False Front: The Left and the "Anti-Imperialist" Right

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False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right
By Bromma

July 2005

As popular resistance to globalization and Western imperialism strengthens around the globe, something disastrous is happening: Leadership of the opposition is swinging steadily from the Left to the radical Right.

Right-wing forces around the world are gearing up to fight against capitalism’s new world order. Every day on the streets of Baghdad, of Mosul, of Tikrit, of Fallujah, of Samarra, of Basra, there is living, dying proof that rightists are in the vanguard of the fight against the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. It is the same in Afghanistan. Indeed, as Western capital struggles to penetrate and control the so-called Islamic world, clerical fascist and other hard-core reactionary trends have spearheaded opposition in country after country. This right wing “anti-imperialism” isn’t confined to the Moslem-inhabited countries, either. Militant rebellious political movements on the Right are gathering strength everywhere, including North America. Often these trends are more radical, better rooted in popular culture and better armed than the current Left.

One would think that the Left would be galvanized by this phenomenon of right-wing “anti-imperialism”; would be bending every effort to understand it and combat its poisonous influence. In fact, the Left, with few exceptions, is doing its best to ignore it.

It’s not like we haven’t been warned. The catastrophe in Iraq is hardly the first time that the Left has witnessed powerful right-wing influence over anti-imperialist movements.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Left anti-imperialists fighting the Shah of Iran and his U.S. sponsors embraced a united front with radical right-wing Islamist fundamentalists. Most Iranian leftists (and their Western supporters) were convinced that anti-imperialist popular sentiment would “naturally” benefit the Left; they were sure that patriarchal fundamentalism would be quickly isolated and out-maneuvered after the revolution.

So when Iranian women struggled for their human rights, leftists criticized them for being “divisive.” It was alleged that women’s demands would weaken the anti-imperialist united front against America and its agents. Azar Majedi, an Iranian activist, recalls:

Women who had never before worn a Hejab [the Islamic head cover for women], put it on voluntarily for the sake of ‘society and revolution’....One common slogan in the demonstrations [was], ‘Sister, your Hejab is more potent than our guns.’

The sacrifice of women’s rights in order to appease the fundamentalists played a major role the violent decimation of the Iranian Left.

And again, in the 1980s, when Afghans were struggling to expel the Soviet invaders, many leftists around the world downplayed the difference between freedom fighters and right-wing fundamentalist criminals. Most of the Left (Soviet apologists excepted, of course) heartily endorsed any and all “popular resistance” to the Soviet imperialists, turning a blind eye to the actual program and practice of the rising Islamist reactionary groups. Afghan women’s criticisms of the fascist mujihedeen fell on deaf ears. After all, the jihadis were fighting for “national liberation”—that seemed, within the dominant Left paradigm, to trump everything.

Meanwhile, Afghan women’s organizations, and the secular resistance generally, were viciously attacked from two sides: the Soviets and the Islamist hard Right. It was the radical Right which ended up dominating that “anti-imperialist” war in Afghanistan. Today they dominate the armed resistance to U.S. intervention. The result is a shattered nation, endlessly brutalized within shifting combinations of imperialist genocide and clerical fascist terror.

Years after the Soviet defeat, some of the Western Left still clung to bizarre illusions about the political potential of the reactionary mujehedin. An Afghan revolutionary complained to the Journal of the Centre for Women and Socialism in 2001:

When Ahmad Shah Masood [the charismatic military leader of the Northern Alliance] was visiting France we heard that even 'left' organisations have supported him. A journal of [the] communist party of Italy had pictured him as the unique leader of Afghanistan and had suggested that Osama Bin laden and other terrorists should instead of blowing trade centres, use their ability to lead a revolution against ‘America's Imperialism’ ...Such organisations insist that they are leading the movements for freedom and justice. These kinds of attitudes make other left organisations unreal…in the eyes of people.

And now, there is the war in Iraq. Most of the Left was wildly euphoric about the early resistance in Iraq and the outpouring of mass global anti-war sentiment. Triumphal statements about the emergence of a new movement for social justice were the common currency of left-wing discourse. Larry Wing of “War Times” exulted that, “Most important of all, and underlying all the other developments, is the emergence of a new superpower: the world's people. As one we rose up on Feb. 15 to smite the empire. Antiwar sentiment is so great in most countries that even most reactionary leaders dare not cross us.” Tom Hayden, not to be outdone, proclaimed, “There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s.” “A global anti-war movement unlike anything that has existed for three decades — that is, since the close of the Vietnam War,” trumpeted International A.N.S.W.E.R. According to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, “The issue of the war and Bush military policy is beginning to coalesce an incredibly wide range of social forces: anti-globalization, anti-capitalists, labor, national movements, students, greens, liberals, anarchists, etc., etc. This movement is beginning to reflect, in embryonic form, the coalition of social forces that can ultimately transform society.”

Yes, but transform it in what direction?

Can it really be that leftists didn’t notice the actual politics of the forces leading the armed struggle against the Western imperialists in Iraq? Has the Left somehow missed the virulent global opposition to the Iraq war that comes from the Right? Can it be unaware that the “incredibly wide range of social forces” opposing the Bush and Blair regimes’ war includes millions of right-wing political Islamists, Baath Party torturers, reactionary Japanese nationalists, Hindu fascists, dozens of right-wing dictators, former heads of the CIA and NSA, the Pope, capitalists in every country, conservative Republicans, antisemitic Russian nationalists, Pat Buchanan, the hard right British National Party, generals and admirals, David Duke, and most neo-nazi organizations worldwide?

For some time after the anglo-american invasion, it was difficult to find mention—let alone serious analysis—of the role of right-wing religious fundamentalism, antisemitism, fascism and reactionary populism among the global forces opposing the invasion and occupation. In fact, the Left usually spoke and acted as if there were one big progressive anti-intervention coalition on the rise. There seemed to be an assumption that the Left was the natural vanguard of these forces. This assumption was—is—as false as it is dangerous.

With the passage of time and events in Iraq, this delusional attitude has become less and less rational. But that hasn’t provoked any self-criticism. Most of the Left still tries to downplay or evade the whole uncomfortable issue of right-wing anti-imperialism, hoping it will go away by itself. In fact some leftists have adopted an even more reprehensible course: They have decided to participate in an open alliance with the fundamentalists. These “super” anti-imperialists demand “unconditional support” for the “resistance,” and consider anyone uncomfortable with this formula to be liberal and chauvinist.

It’s as if the tragedies in Iran and Afghanistan had never happened. Once again, the Left is pushing women’s freedom to the sidelines, supposedly in the name of anti-imperialism. Once again, “politics” is being twisted into a struggle between imperialist men and “anti-imperialist” men—even if those “anti-imperialist” men enslave women.

It’s now glaringly obvious that right-wing Islamist fundamentalism has become a major actor in world politics; that fact puts the pathological denial among leftists into stark relief. But we should be clear that Islamist radicalism is only one version of the right-wing “anti-imperialism” in motion today. It might be most accurate to say that right-wing Islamist insurgency is the leading edge of a worldwide phenomenon. Right wing populism, with fascist elements contending for vanguard leadership, is coming to life in country after country. Including much closer to home than Iraq.

Militant right-wing “anti imperialism” is growing in the U.S. White supremacists and fascists like Louis Beam, Matt Hale and Tom Metzger hate the neo-cons and Bush; they despise globalization’s New World Order. Therefore they study Left-led movements, coopt their language and even try to attract the activists working within them. They reason that, as Beam writes, “The New American Patriot will be neither left nor right, just a freeman fighting for liberty...The new politics of America is liberty from the NWO [New World Order] Police State and nothing more.”

Many neo-fascists and Christian fundamentalists loudly “support” Palestinian struggle against Israel, and Left activists in the solidarity movement find that they are forced to weed antisemites out of web forums and events. Organizers against the Patriot Acts are consciously building a coalition between the Left and Right. “Third Position” neo-fascists in Europe and North America actively petition Leftists and progressives to a join in a common platform opposing U.S. interventionism and hegemony in the world. Today, just as in Mussolini and Hitler’s time, many fascists claim a “spiritual kinship” to the natural world and claim to “defend” it. (“Ecology is for Aryans too,” says Tom Metzger.) Criticisms of the New World Order and its negative effects on the domestic social contract in the metropolis now crop up everywhere on the Right; they sometimes sound indistinguishable from Left anti-globalization arguments.

Remarkably, some of the hard Right’s leadership is even moderating its public positions on race in order to pave the way for potential “anti-capitalist” alliances with non-white movements. Perhaps the races should be separate, they say, but we should all unite against the common enemy—global capital. James Porazzo, head of the neo-nazi skinhead group the American Front, argues for a program of “White autonomy, Black autonomy, Brown autonomy and death to the current twisted system. The only other obvious route would be an eventual winner take all race war: I don’t think anyone with any sense would want that.”

While the fascists are less developed in the U.S. than in Europe and other parts of the world, they are steadily growing in influence and organization. Their “anti-imperialist” views resonate widely within the ranks of militia members, Christian fundamentalists and ordinary conservatives, many of who are openly rebelling against the program of Bush and the neoconservatives—not just in Iraq but also on a range of domestic and international issues.

Judging by the reaction of leftists in U.S. antiwar movement, this is a good thing. Today, as rightists swell the ranks of anti-interventionists, they are being quietly tolerated, and frequently welcomed, by leftists. “What unites us is greater than anything that divides us,” says a leader of UFPJ. Anti-war speeches by Robert Byrd and writings by anti-war Christian fundamentalists appear on IndyMedia and other left-wing web sites. The Nation recently ran an entire article based on the pandering premise that Ronald Reagan, since he was a “true conservative,” would surely have pulled out of Iraq by now.

Left descriptions of the Iraqi resistance soft-pedal the right-wing forces that pervade it. Photos of huge all-male demonstrations in Muslim-populated countries are printed without comment; antisemitic slogans shouted at mass protests in Iraq and around the world are quietly edited out. Iraqi women’s fears about the possibility of a clerical fascist take-over of the country, widely reported in the mainstream press, are muted in the Left’s writings. Could it be that the Left is preparing to repeat, on a larger and larger scale, the mistakes made in Iran and Afghanistan?

It’s important to examine why there is a mass-based “anti-imperialist” right wing uprising in the world at this historical juncture and what that implies for the Left practically. Such an investigation may provide a window into the class changes enforced by the latest incarnation of global capitalism. It may also afford us perspective on the weaknesses of the post-WWII wave of revolutionary world struggle, weaknesses that allowed capitalism to surmount that movement’s powerful challenge. And finally, we may see hints of where we can look for the emergence of a new Left, able to survive and grow on the terrain of a transformed capitalist order.

A Right-Wing Class Struggle

For many years the international Left has been accustomed to thinking of the hard Right as an appendage of the ruling capitalists. To some extent, this is a conditioned reflex arising out of the realities of the post-WWII period. During this optimistic era of anti-colonial liberation and socialist revolution, anti-imperialism was virtually “owned” by the Left, whose forces were the ones challenging capital’s control over the Third World (and defending social contracts in the metropolis). The radical Right, whose international leadership was discredited and smashed in the world war, seemed to rely on patriotic flag-waving support for Western imperialists, racist frothing at the mouth, and kooky fringe politics. However, instrumentalist views of the extreme Right as a “tool of the ruling class” have never been particularly accurate, and are at any rate being rendered increasingly irrelevant by events in our time.

It’s crucial to remember that the fascist politics espoused by Hitler and Mussolini was much more than a stratagem of the bourgeoisie. In fact, prewar fascism was a mass revolutionary movement of the far Right, spun in freedom-fighting, anti-bourgeois terms. Rooted in class grievances and class ambitions, it was both populist and insurrectionary in practice. The radical Right worldwide is now adopting a similar rebellious spirit. This occurs in the context of massive global change, which is fundamentally transforming the capitalist system.

Part of what defines this change on the political level is that the wave of Left-led anti-colonial struggle in the world has largely exhausted its momentum, giving way to neo-colonialism and warlordism in case after case. The national liberation struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s shook world capitalism to its core. But capitalism has survived and metastasized, altering the dynamics of class struggle irreversibly in the process.

Once Left-led national liberation movements exerted an irresistible magnetic attraction on hundreds of millions of people; now we see huge reactionary mass movements gaining momentum using similar “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. This is a consequence of the onset of capitalist neo-globalization, which is shuffling the deck of world classes, causing despair and outrage among not only the most oppressed but also among middle classes desperate to protect ways of life, turf and privileges. Therefore a new social base—not just for right wing populism but also for fascist and other radical right-wing discontent—expands daily.

Neo-globalization has led to splits in the Right worldwide. Most fundamentally, it has caused a split between those who continue to cast their lot with transnational corporate capital (for instance, the neo-conservatives in the U.S.), and others, including most of the fascist Right, who see the new world order as a mortal enemy of their way of life—a threat, in fact, to the very existence of the classes out of which they emerge. Despite the ascendancy of a neo-conservative group in the current U.S. regime, the rebellious trend is the more dynamic side of this divide, growing in popularity and organization in many countries as it hones its “anti-imperialist” and “anti-corporate” message. Increasingly the international Right is positioning itself as the defender of the “little man” against an impersonal capitalist system (often seen as run by Jews) which is violating previously-sacrosanct national social contracts, caste systems, privileges and divisions of turf. It appears likely that the “blame game” sure to follow the neoconservative failures in the Middle East and the hollowing out of the U.S. economy will further energize the more rebellious tendencies.

Recipe for Rebellion

The place where the dramatic changes in class politics wrought by globalization are most sharply posed right now is in the so-called Islamic world—the very place where neo-globalization is most urgently projected by Western imperialism.

We know that capitalism must expand to survive, and Western imperialism, with its stagnant home economies, must penetrate the Moslem-inhabited countries in a whole new way to expand. On one obvious level, Western capital needs to continue to control the oil and other traditional resources in this part of the world. And from a geo-strategic point of view, whichever particular capitalists control the Middle East and Central Asia will have a tremendous advantage over their capitalist rivals, including rapidly emerging powers like China. This makes the race for penetration particularly pressurized.

But these imperatives explain only part of imperialism’s compulsion to expand—the part most familiar to the Left, since it is carried over from an earlier paradigm. On a deeper level, modern capitalism pushes to destroy and re-organize entire social structures in its drive for a new and different sort of economic expansion.

Capitalist neo-globalization seeks to enlarge and transform its presence in Muslim-populated regions, as elsewhere in the world, by means of extension, intensification and recombination. That is, it extends hungrily into all the remaining unexploited territories in the world, from the remotest regions of Central Asia to the Lacandon rain forest. In addition, it intensifies its commodification of all aspects of existence, including air, water, the airwaves, ideas, plant and animal species and human genetic material. (This is what Indian leftist Vandana Shiva calls “the new enclosure of the commons.”) It fosters and creates new “needs,” searching at an accelerated pace for ways to target, market and enhance consumption.

Finally, it “samples” and recombines formerly fixed economic and social elements—agriculture and manufacturing, labor forces, consumer markets, privileges, old and new classes, races, genders and nationalities. Thriving on fluidity, mobility and, significantly, on chaos, the new imperialism breaks down old borders, social formations and cultures, builds new ones, then breaks them down again.

In its drive to extend, intensify and recombine, neo-globalization promotes new technologies, especially biological and information technologies that allow capitalism to exploit human and natural resources faster, farther, more thoroughly and more flexibly. A central focus of neo globalization (as it has been for each stage of capitalism) is a dramatic reconfiguration of the means of controlling the proletariat, and especially proletarian women, whose exploitation is the foundation of the entire system. This is transforming traditional family and gender relations.

From the point of view of many classes in the Muslim-inhabited countries, the arrival of Western-led neo-globalization is an unmitigated disaster. Most of the Left is acutely aware of the savage impact of IMF-World Bank loansharking, commodity agriculture and hit-and run manufacturing on the poorest sectors of the colonial world. This pauperization leads to a tremendous rise in de-classed and desperately immiserated populations which constitute tinder-boxes for warlordism, ethnic conflict and radical populism of various sorts.

But we should also consider what Western globalization means for diverse middle classes, some of which comprise large populations and occupy significant niches in the national, regional and local capitalist economies of the “Islamic world.” For instance, the encroachment of globally integrated factory farming destroys the class position of even prosperous farmers in the Muslim countries. The new reach and thoroughness of global commodity markets undermines established ways of life for merchants, small bankers and regional or national manufacturers. Global homogenization of trade wipes out whole classes based on local or regional trading, transport and smuggling. (This is very much at issue in Afghanistan, which sits on top of one of the world’s most profitable smuggling routes.)

Local functionaries, clan leaders, intellectuals and professionals leading middle-class lives within existing national and local societies are well aware that they risk class demotion or extinction as global culture and centralized global authority moves onto their turf. Military officers, accustomed to influence and privilege, face an unpalatable choice between ceding power to a higher authority with its own agenda, or being replaced completely. Established religious leaders, who currently control dense networks of social, cultural and economic influence, realize that neo-globalization could eliminate or seriously weaken their position in society.

This is a pattern emerging in every part of the world: Many classes, including middle classes, are recognizing the new fragility of their economic and social status as the neo-globalization juggernaut advances.

Of course, some classes are actually benefiting, or hoping to benefit, from the changes. For example, some Indian middle classes which have caught a wave of cutting edge information technology and are riding it to a new standard of living. But overall, the pressure is downward on existing middle classes, since the whole former basis for social contracts between nationally based capitalists and “their” middle classes is disappearing.

During this time of transition, as the deck of classes is shuffled, old patterns of metropolitan privilege still provide some advantages. People with access to these privileges still do have a leg up in the competition for middle-class life within the new imperial order.

But this is likely to be a relative and temporary advantage, unlike what existed a generation ago. There’s not a whole lot of security of privilege today—in safety, in standard of living, in employment. One day you are a subsidized white settler in “Rhodesia,” the next day your farm is occupied by Africans, and you are planning your escape from Zimbabwe. One day you are sitting in a café in Belgrade sipping cappuccino, the next day NATO bombs are falling and you have no running water or electricity. One day you are a hot-shot systems designer in New York who can practically name his own salary, the next day your unemployment insurance is running out and you are reading about how well things are going in Bangalore. All this is excellent from the point of view of the giant corporations and finance capitalists. Global capital is shaking off the constraints of the old social order. Classes are being transformed and recycled at an accelerated pace; today’s social contract will likely end up in tomorrow’s dumpster.

At the end of the last capitalist era, middle classes had more options. Sometimes they supported the existing capitalist order (which, after all, had established roles for them). Other times they supported or allied with proletarian struggles that seemed to advance their class interests beyond the existing order. Today, many middle classes feel completely trapped. The former capitalist order is falling apart, and so is the former proletarian struggle. Global change is impacting their way of life, but they have virtually no political control over it. Therefore many middle-class populations are worried, angry, frustrated and nostalgic.

This is especially true in parts of the colonial world that are culturally and politically isolated from the centers of modern imperialist power—places like the Muslim-populated countries. Already angry about generations of old-style colonialism, discrimination and racist disrespect emanating from the Christian West, many middle classes in the Middle East and Central Asia now clearly recognize that they have little or no access to the levers and portals of the new global economy; that their social and economic functions are being treated as mere pawns and obstacles within Western-led globalization.

The middle classes endangered by neo-globalization are not all going quietly. And despite the hopes and expectations of the Left, some of them are linking up with desperate and de-classed populations of the poor—refugees, guerrillas looking for another war, the chronically unemployed, street gangs, etc.—in an alliance of reactionary anger against global capital. Frequently welded together by an ideology of cultural superiority and a traditionalist mythology, these political movements reflect a powerful yearning to turn back the clock to a time when their classes had leverage and hopeful futures.

But although they often fetishize the past, the forces of the rebellious Right are not just some exotic “traditional” holdovers from an earlier time. In fact the rebellious Right’s various trends embody very up-to-date attempts to defeat, influence or get a piece of the action within the new world order by struggling against the current leadership and agenda of world capital. This reflects an entirely correct understanding that only those who are prepared to fight will be able to survive and carve out space for themselves in the new capitalist landscape.

Men Against Neo-Globalization

Above all, various classes of men (worldwide, not just in Muslim-majority areas) have a special hatred of neo-globalization because it challenges their traditional ownership and control over women.

One of advancing neo-globalization’s key characteristics is that it accelerates the breakdown of traditional patriarchal family structures, in which individual men directly supervise and control women and benefit privately from their labor. Familiar forms of male dominance over women are being gradually replaced with post-modern systems of oppression that cut ordinary men out of the parasitic loop. For many men of the dispossessed classes, this is the ultimate loss, the ultimate insult.

Just as it did during earlier waves of genocide and colonialism, Western imperialism postures today as the world “protector” of women’s rights. And we are in fact witnessing the elevation of some women within the new capitalist order as a means of controlling the rest more effectively. This is part of the new style social contract that capitalists want and actively promote. Butch Lee puts it with characteristic bluntness:

Right now “post-feminist” women in the capitalist metropolis think life is just getting better and better. Hillary, women’s pro sports, flying jets over the Third World bombing away, and business opportunities, too. Who woulda imagined? It couldn’t be whiter for us. I think we are like those newly-enfranchised German women in the liberal Weimar Republic days during 1919-1933. Sleep walking on the edge of the precipice. For patriarchal capitalism is always dangerous to us. Deadly dangerous.”

—(The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)



Needless to say, neo-globalization has nothing to do with “liberating” the masses of women. Quite the opposite.

Modern capitalism demands that more and more women and children be marshaled in concentrated, efficient commodity production and transnational service industries. It gathers them into large flexible labor pools directly tied to the world economy. Where this process is already well underway—for instance in the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border or the brothels of Bangkok or the burgeoning transnational domestic worker industry—it is revolutionizing gender relations: ripping young women out of traditional rural patriarchy and concentrating them into communities of women organized around their new work. Women’s lives are in many cases disciplined directly by the employer, who may control not just the workplace but also housing and access to health care, education, childcare and entertainment.

Simultaneously, neo-globalization creates significant sectors of unemployed, de-classed and often women-less men. Male street terror and warlordism feeding on this conveniently growing reservoir of outcast men plays a significant role in repressing women’s attempts at self-organization. This is a post-modern horror fitting to the current incarnation of imperialism on steroids.

The radical Right internationally is characterized by a united front of men of various threatened classes trying to protect or augment their role—their share of power—within capitalist patriarchy. From the perspective of many of these men, it’s better to die than to lose ownership of “their” women.

Broad support for the Right arises among men who live in traditional family settings and who feel endangered by the encroaching changes in capitalism. But the rebellious Right, and especially its rising fascist vanguard, is also populated by men who have basically already lost that battle. Within the warlord armies of the hard Right are whole populations of women-less men, such as the mujihedeen flowing out of the madrassas of Pakistan. Because of the chaos and radical reorganization of post-modern society, these men have little prospect of becoming the patriarchs of traditional, stable families. Many have hardly any “normal” contact with women at all. Instead, they have become outlaws in search of male power, dreaming of warrior empires where they can take whatever they want by force, especially women. At times, this fascistic fantasy becomes reality: post-modern world politics offers them chances to rule neighborhoods, whole cities (as in Iraq), or countries (like Afghanistan and Iran). There are endless opportunities to dominate, rape and terrorize women on a local scale.

The struggle around globalization currently raging between the rebellious Right and Western imperialism pivots around which men get to control women, and how. It’s no coincidence that gender figures so prominently in the unfolding of the dramatic confrontations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. It will probably play a central role in every struggle over neo- globalization to come.

The approaching tidal wave should alert us. In country after country, right wing men are re-enslaving women as a subhuman class....This is the largest mass political movement in the world by far.

(Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)

In the U.S., Too

Neo-globalization impacts classes in various ways depending on concrete factors; it affects the colonial world differently from the metropolis. Yet there are class shifts generating rebellious right-wing trends almost everywhere. For example, U.S. society is undergoing a hollowing-out process involving the downsizing of its middle classes, including its bloated labor aristocracies. This has produced a large and sometimes militant resentment on the Right.

The New Deal is definitely off: global capital doesn’t need it any more, and the Left can’t do anything to get it back. The social, economic and political functions once usefully provided to imperialism by subsidized middle-class white populations are being gradually exported around the world. In place of an American New Deal, there is now a new, more flexible “distributed” multicultural web of middle classes being raised up in internationally to administer empire, develop and implement technology, organize production, enforce social stratification and soak up consumer goods.

This upsets millions of white people in the U.S. whose special way of life was supposedly guaranteed by the old social contract. It also upsets some non-white Americans, who see their chance for a piece of the American Dream evaporating along with the Dream itself. Many Americans understand neo-globalization as nothing less than betrayal by their own national capitalists, and they are prepared to fight to bring back some version of their old way of life.

One theme latent in the right-wing critique is that the older, “nation-based” capitalism was somehow healthier, freer and more caring than the new world order. From the standpoint of oppressed classes and peoples this is absurd. Nothing is ever likely to surpass the atrocities perpetrated in North America and around the world by “old style” U.S.-based capitalism. But among the millions of Americans who see their privileges dissipating, the real issue is that the capitalists used to be more loyal—loyal to their home societies generally, and to white middle-class American men specifically.

This feeling of betrayal constitutes an opportunity for the North American Left to discuss politics on a very concrete level with a lot of people. But as we have seen, this type of social discontent also constitutes a major opening for the populist Right, including the fascist right.

This danger is very much evident in current mass politics. What most of the people marching in U.S. anti-war demonstrations are most disturbed about is not the suffering of the Iraqi people. (How many demonstrated against the hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly child deaths, caused by pre-war sanctions in Iraq?) Rather, their protest is aimed at trying to halt the relentless undermining
of middle-class life in the metropolis, which the Bush regime’s costly and “reckless” international policy seems calculated to accelerate.

A letter from Garth Talbott, a disenchanted soldier serving in Iraq, expresses this growing sentiment in a particularly honest way:


Didn't we secure the oil fields? Aren't we a capitalist country anymore? Can't we sidestep OPEC now? Can't we at least, somewhere in the midst of deception, half truths and outright lies, catch an honest break?

If we're going to fight for a cause that isn't known, get fired on by our own weapons, and get screwed out of our benefits, then at least for God's sake give us something concrete to say we fought for—even if it's as trivial as being able to fill our gas tanks for 98 cents a gallon.

(Chico News and Review 10/29/03)

The North American hard Right’s message of entitlement and anti-globalization is very much in tune with this sentiment. The rebellious white Right demands a return to the “good” old days, to the “natural” order of things—including stable colonial privilege and a familiar gender hierarchy.

We got a taste of how this looks in the fascist David Duke’s notorious column praising antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan:

Cindy Sheehan has a lot to be angry about. Her son was betrayed and his life lost by government officials who treasonably created and continue a war for Israel and the Jewish supremacist agenda rather than that of the United States.

We stand with Cindy Sheehan and the memory of her son which should spur all truly patriotic Americans to demand an end to this war for Israel, this war against America, the Iraq War.

It is not Iraq’s borders that need protecting, it is the American border with Mexico!

Support our troops…bring them home!


Thankfully, Sheehan repudiated Duke’s ugly brew of antiwar anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant venom. But we’d be naive to think that every “Gold Star” mother will do the same. Duke’s argument is deeply rooted in American culture.

Since the “premature fascism” of the Oklahoma City bombing, the American militia movement and the anti-government fundamentalism that spawned Timothy McVeigh has been regrouping, and some of it is professionalizing and going deeper underground. But it certainly hasn’t lost influence in America. On the contrary, its basic precepts have steadily migrated into the broader Right and mainstream conservatism. The evident failure of the neocon’s war on Iraq is accelerating this process rapidly.


A right-wing anti-war viewpoint has been adopted by widely read pundits like Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts and Charley Reese. It’s also been taken up by many right-wing libertarians, who see U.S. overseas adventurism as a Big Government assault on a free and sacred way of life at home. And many forward-thinking conservative politicians with their fingers on the pulse of middle-class discontent are also experimenting with this line of argument.

Here is part of the March 8, 2003 anti-war resignation letter of Jack Walters, chairman of the Boone County, Missouri Republican Central Committee—which is less inspiring than it is chilling:

What we are about to do in the Middle East is abhorrent to me. It is made doubly so since this is a contrived and fraudulently justified war with hidden objectives. The coming mass slaughter of innocents, the harm our own troops are being placed in, and the potential for wars on several fronts have brought home to me the sobering realization that by remaining Boone County Republican Chairman, I would be giving tacit approval to this imminent war, and tacit approval to the belligerent and reckless language coming from the White House. The safety and integrity of our country outweighs politics....I am resigning because I cannot support the Republican position on this war. I only sought the position of Chairman originally in the hope that I could recruit God-fearing, thinking, pro-life believers in our Constitution to stand for office.

Much what Walters says could have been written by a leftist. It was posted, in fact, on the left-wing IndyMedia web site as a positive example of growing antiwar sentiment. But Walters’ criticism is from the Right, not the Left. He hopes to “restore” America to its Christian fundamentalist, patriarchal roots.


The U.S. Left has been reticent about challenging this kind of mass politics directly. (This is not too surprising for the white Left, which has historically been notoriously susceptible to the lure of right wing populism.) Leftists want to agitate about the “domestic costs” of the war, and “support” young people trapped in the U.S. military, but we don’t know how to distinguish our appeals from what the Right’s. On some level the Left is aware, at least intellectually, that right-wing populist movements, often led by fascists, are a growing power overseas. But we don’t know what to do about that. And we don’t want to think that it could happen here, despite the fact that “betrayed” privilege has always been the mother’s milk of the radical right.

This confusion is evident in recent U.S. protests against globalization. Appeals for solidarity with the Third World mix freely with protectionism and defense of privilege. Trying to cut through the fog, J. Sakai writes about the class character of the anti-WTO coalition that demonstrated in Seattle. (This protest was widely hailed because of the participation of longshoremen and other unions, which gave it a special seal of approval among leftists.)


The average West Coast longshoreman earns about $60,000-80,000 a year. It's not unusual for highly-skilled longshoremen or clerks who push overtime to hit $125,000-150,000 per year. With income guarantees and a full benefits package. This is the kind of income that lawyers, accountants, corporate middle managers, and successful small businessmen make. And union longshoremen have the vacation homes, boats, multiple cars, stock portfolios or rental properties that are common for the u.s. middle classes....

It is the old middle classes of the imperialist center that are in motion here politically [in the anti-WTO movement]. Commercial family farmers; small retailers; the labor aristocracy of highly-paid craftsmen and unionized industrial workers; that stratum of intellectuals (more than a few of them liberal or "socialist") tied tit-to-mouth to the old welfare state. Plus the marginalized white lumpen-petitbourgeoisie, bitter at their social exile from paradise.

These are middle classes whose privileged but also precarious existence is bound up with successful national imperialism, and who look for security towards their old national economy and the insular national culture of the "good old days". In a word, who deep down consider themselves rightfully part of the capitalist winners, not the oppressed "losers". (Don't forget that Tim McVeigh tried to be a career Army officer, while his comrade-in-arms Terry Nichols was a failed farm owner).

(“Aryan Politics and Fighting the W.T.O.,” 2002.)



That’s why Patrick Buchanan felt comfortable speaking from the steps of the Teamster building during the large anti-globalization demonstration in Washington D.C. That’s also why neo-fascist leaders heaped praise on the Seattle protests for their militant opposition to the new world order.

Since the Left is in denial about right wing populism’s significance, we tend to accommodate it in all kinds of united fronts. We seem to operate on the unexamined assumption that any enemy of globalizing capitalism is good, that all oppositional roads lead to the Left. In fact, when rightists oppose U.S. imperialism, the Left often interprets this as a sort of validation; a sign of how correct we were all along. (“If even a conservative like Robert Byrd can see that the war is wrong, then we must really be on the verge of great things.”)

As we see with the demand for “unconditional support” for the Iraqi “resistance,” some U.S. leftists have decided to go further and adopt parts of the Right’s program. This has happened in a variety of political arenas. Some (supposedly left-wing) environmentalists have agitated against immigrants and turned their backs on people with AIDS. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is considered a role model in certain anarchist circles. Some “race traitor” theorists have glorified the right-wing militia movement, and written sympathetically about Timothy McVeigh. Workers World Party and other leftists (including influential intellectuals like Michael Parenti) have campaigned in support of the genocidal warlord Slobodan Milosevic as well as the despotic North Korean regime.

Both Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein have been the subject of mendacious “rehabilitation” campaigns cobbled together by leftists who think that anybody who is attacked by the U.S. must be progressive. (One of the most disturbing examples of this is the attempt to argue that Baathist fascism in Iraq was a positive force for women.)

The corrupt merger of Left and Right is more advanced in Europe and other parts of the world than it is in the U.S. Yet the bulk of the Left here habitually treats right wing populism with kid gloves, avoiding anything that seems “sectarian,” especially in public. Furthermore, North American leftists display an amazing capacity for rationalizing away practices of patriarchal authoritarianism, violence against women, state repression, forced conscription of children, drug-gangsterism, and macho posturing on the part of any world force that declares itself to be “anti-imperialist.” This isn’t an encouraging sign for the future.

Historically, when right wing populism is strong, it is perfectly normal to have crossover between Left and Right. Mussolini was originally a militant leader of the Italian socialists. The Nazis recruited among political leftists and within what had originally been left-leaning subcultures. In East Germany, rebellious anarchists and rebellious neo-nazi skinheads switched sides regularly. Former Soviet “communists” are now Russian fascists. Today, with the Right already leading powerful mass movements in the world, with fascists and other hard-core rightists in the metropolis infiltrating struggles formerly “owned” by the Left, with the violent Right here becoming more sophisticated and better organized, with the ground already prepared by widespread right-wing populism, we ignore right-wing “anti-imperialism” at our peril.

Why So Unprepared?

Why is so much of the Left, here and internationally, so completely unprepared to confront the danger posed by the rebellious Right today? Why are people who claim to stand for human liberation so tolerant of right wing populism, even after seeing the atrocities, the corpses, the enslavement of women, the shattered countries vulnerable to imperial plunder that have resulted from Left-Right “unity” in other places?

There are many answers, on many levels. For instance, we can understand how leftists who are heavily invested in an older anti-imperialist paradigm can get stuck in it. Having invested so much in that model, they are reluctant to cut it loose, even when it is rendered obsolete by world events. (This has happened to leftists at other nodal points in history.)

We can also understand that criticizing right-wing Islamist fundamentalism while the fundamentalists are fighting imperialism turns on a lot of caution lights. For generations, anti colonial movements have been forced to jealously guard their independence from those “supporters,” especially in the imperialist metropolis, who want to influence or control struggles of oppressed peoples for their own opportunistic purposes.

But to understand why leftists conciliate the anti-imperialist Right is not to excuse them for doing so. To put it plainly: The Left as a whole is betraying women; in the process it is betraying the proletariat. And the fundamental reason for this is that the Left is male dominated.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems incredible that so many anti-imperialists actually believed that we could defeat the most powerful capitalists in the world without women’s full leadership and power in Left movements. Although the post-WWII anti-colonial struggles provided dramatic openings for women’s emancipation (which women certainly tried to take advantage of), the breakthrough to women-centered politics never took place. And after recent decades of defeat and back-pedaling, male leaders and male politics are firmly in control in the international Left. Not only are the most popular anti-imperialist “heroes” men, but many of them are partriarchal authoritarians.

Today, while the radical Right and the imperialists battle it out over ownership of women, the Left still acts as if it’s perfectly normal for men to represent women’s interests in the fight against imperialism. By default, the Left debates world events in terms of imperialism versus anti-imperialist men. This plays completely into the Right’s hands.

When embattled Iraqi women argue that patriarchal fundamentalism and imperialism must be fought simultaneously, they are basically ignored. As anti-imperialist women were in Iran when they resisted gender apartheid. As Afghan women are when they insist that imperialism and fundamentalism are equal dangers. Never mind that in much of Iraq, women can’t even leave their houses because of terrorism—from “anti imperialist” right-wing men as well as from the imperialists and their thugs.

Whoever questions the prevalence of this “see no evil” male attitude would do well to review the leaflets and documents of prominent North American Left groups opposing U.S. policy in Iraq. Early in the occupation, most of these groups refused to even mention the significant threat clerical fascism posed to Iraqi women and society. Instead, they typically labored to make Western imperialism the sole enemy while praising a (studiously undifferentiated) Iraqi “resistance” for fighting back. As this position has become more and more untenable, Left publications have started talking about the “violence” Iraqi women and secular forces face and throwing in an occasional mention about right-wing fundamentalism, always taking care to blame everything on Western imperialism. It’s particularly instructive to contrast the direct, uncompromising anti-fundamentalist public stands of leading Iraqi women’s rights activists with the carefully-diluted quotes that filter down in the Left press here.

What is even more amazing is that there is a steady stream of leftists interviewing, touring with and having photo opportunities with secular Iraqi militants—while ignoring how those militants analyze events in Iraq.

One of the most sought-after groups for solidarity tours and interviews is the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), founded in June 2003. OWFI is leading valiant organizing efforts by anti-occupation/anti-fundamentalist women in the war zone. Some of their activities include organizing neighborhood councils to combat violence against women, running a women’s shelter in Baghdad, holding street rallies demanding women’s rights, and publishing a newspaper called “Al Mousawat” (“Equality”).

But OWFI does not agree with the politics of the Western antiwar movement. They explicitly criticize “those who justify Islamic terrorism with the familiar 1970's religious-nationalist and Third World-ist ‘anti-imperialism.’” OWFI opposes “political Islam” generally. An OWFI leader, Nadia Mahmood, says that Iraqi women are “caught between two programs”—the program of the Anglo-American invaders, and the program of reactionary Islamist forces (each of which she calls “terrorists”). She and other leading OWFI cadre insist on the need to fight both dangers simultaneously, and they disagree sharply with Iraqi Left forces that try to make deals with one reactionary force against the other.

The OWFI activists, supposedly a source of inspiration for the Western Left, see the Islamist armed “resistance” as a second “pole of terrorism” which is destroying their country from one side while Western imperialism destroys it from the other. They say this at every opportunity: It is their political line, which is shared by leading militants in the secular Iraqi trade unions, by organizers in the Union of the Unemployed, etc. Where is this analysis in Western leftists’ “report-backs” on their meetings with the Iraqi militants? Is it given careful attention as part of the antiwar movement’s solidarity rhetoric? Has it become an important issue of debate on the Left? No way.

In fact, when SOWFI, a multiracial committee of women in solidarity with OWFI, was formed in the New York area, Islamists on radio station WBAI smeared them as “racist”. This “progressive” station then completely refused to let SOWFI respond. The rest of the Left did its best to ignore the whole thing.

It should be obvious that when the Left takes this blinkered, male-centric stance towards right-wing anti-imperialist struggles, inside or outside the metropolis, we are objectively entering into a united front with the Right. And we are doing so on conditions wholly advantageous to the hard Right, which has no compunction at all about enforcing its will on women—or on leftists, for that matter. Left-wing anti-imperialism will have to do better than this to survive on imperialism’s new terrain.

As for the arguments about “respecting other cultures” in their attitudes towards women, we have heard them before in Iran and Afghanistan, and they have proven their mendacity and hypocrisy. They are excuses that men make for other men (even if some women go along with them). The Left in the imperial metropolis isn’t doing any favors for the women of Iraq, or those living in any fascist-infested part of the world, by ignoring the dangers they face from the fundamentalist Right, or by tolerating right-wing “anti imperialism” in our own movements. In reality, this is a particularly ugly form of metropolitan opportunism, which siphons whatever small support we have to offer away from those who need and deserve it most and funnels it to one of their deadliest oppressors. There can be no serious Left argument that oppressing, enslaving or physically attacking women is any sort of cultural “right.” Nor is their any legitimate claim to “self-determination” for slavemasters.

It’s time to acknowledge a prominent feature of the neo-colonial landscape: Rightists and reactionaries of all sorts increasingly adopt the language and forms of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in order to seek legitimacy, protect their turf and eliminate opposition. And if we can’t talk about the difference between a fascist gang and a liberation struggle, how are we to accomplish anything?

Both Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist

It is in the colonial world, of course, not the metropolis, that the question of how to relate to right-wing “anti-imperialists” has the most immediate consequence and is most explosive, and that is where it is being posed most sharply for leftists.

Crucially, there are parts of the international Left that have survived and evolved in the free-fire zones of the war between Western imperialism and the fundamentalist Right, and which are determined to fight both evils at the same time.

As we have seen, OWFI and other Iraqi activists are taking up this two-front struggle, against overwhelming odds. Iranian leftists are also regrouping and organizing to overthrow the right wing Islamic fundamentalist regime in their country. Needless to say, they have little sympathy for the old “Left-Right united front against imperialism.” The Iranian regime is deeply unpopular, and has been confronted with widespread protests in recent years. Many of these have been led by young women; veil-burning is one of the characteristic protest activities. As Ali Javadi, an Iranian activist told Against the Current, “In some sense, the current revolution in Iran could be a female revolution and, in fact, has all the signs of being one.”

Perhaps the most familiar example (at least in the West) of a Third World Left initiative that fights both imperialism and right-wing religious fundamentalism is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. For decades, this organization has resisted not only Soviet and U.S. attacks, but also, simultaneously, the clerical fascists. Today they continue to organize—aboveground where possible and underground where necessary. Through a remarkable effort, they have pulled together schools and literacy programs, survival industries for women, hospitals and clinics and wave after wave of agitation for women’s rights and against the enemies of their people. They persist in their dangerous work in spite of the fact that they get relatively insignificant support from the male-dominated international Left.

RAWA has openly stated that opposing imperialism without also opposing fundamentalism is doomed.

We believe that any and all manifestation of deference and submissiveness on the part of certain social and political groupings and individuals and literary circles vis-à-vis the fundamentalists is abject cowardice, and assert that perpetrators of such cowardice are bound to ultimately reveal themselves as accomplices in treason with fundamentalist traitors. We shall therefore struggle unrelentingly to expose all such collaborators.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) hereby reiterates that only decisive and uncompromising struggle against fundamentalism is the key to the solution of the Afghan conundrum and the cessation of foreign interference in our country. We call upon all pro-freedom and pro-democracy Afghan organizations and individuals to wake up to the burden of the great sorrow of our people, to cast despair overboard, to consider any and all deals and compromises with the fundamentalist hangmen as high treason and to rally to mobilize the masses for the formation of a broad anti-fundamentalist front geared to exposing and ejecting religious fascists and establishing a society based on democratic values in Afghanistan.

(“On the 6th Black Anniversary of the Swarming of Fundamentalist Criminals Into Kabul,” 4/98)

What’s particularly notable in RAWA’s understanding of imperialism is how they link imperialist interference in their country to the warlordism and fascism of right wing men. This isn’t abstract theory for them, but a lived reality.

It is well known that the Western imperialists helped create, arm and organize the reactionary warlords of Afghanistan in order to weaken their Soviet rival. It was fine with Western capital that these men destroyed much of the country and enslaved its women. In fact, it was fine with them when one of these vicious groupings, the Taliban, took over Afghanistan completely. Fine, that is, as long as they played by Western capital’s rules.

But the Taliban, like the rest of the rebellious Right, had its own independent reactionary program. When they pursued their independent agenda too far, and it became a threat to Western interests, the imperialists slammed them down (destroying even more of the country in the process). This new war against their own former client led them to fund and sponsor an alternate group of clerical fascists and warlords, the Northern Alliance. These criminals, who now run most of Afghanistan, include some of the worst slavemasters, acid-throwers and torturers in the country.

Amazingly, the Taliban, despite having its gangster “anti-imperialism” seriously weakened, still has the ability to negotiate with Western imperialism while simultaneously engaged in armed struggle against it. They are living proof that the religious fascists of Afghanistan will do anything at all to maximize their turf and power. Despite their anti-imperialist rhetoric, they are determined players within the current world capitalist matrix. And the imperialists understand perfectly—it’s just normal male politics. If a suitable deal can be struck, fine. If not, then “bring it on!”

RAWA realized starting in the 1970s that it is a deadly mistake for freedom-loving women to permit fascistic men to pretend that they are fighting for national freedom. During the war against the Soviet Union, RAWA made every attempt to build a secular, democratic liberation struggle, refusing to moderate their anti-fundamentalist stance. They actually had little choice: fundamentalist men were attacking and murdering RAWA activists because they stood for women’s rights. Despite their best efforts, the secular resistance was marginalized and crushed.

RAWA argues that the clerical fascists have done nothing but weaken Afghanistan as a nation, leaving the country open to continued imperialist interference. Militant as RAWA is in their opposition to both Soviet and U.S. imperialism, they have never viewed the fundamentalist warlords as part of a united front for national liberation, but rather as a murderous enemy.

There are two ways to look at RAWA’s hard-earned analysis. One way is to argue that they are “putting the cart before the horse.” RAWA’s desire to bring forward the battle against religious fascism is understandable, we might say, but misguided. “Sophisticated” leftists know that the fundamentalists be attacked only after imperialism is defeated. That, in fact, is exactly what most of the Western Left is used to saying. But don’t we already know where that road leads?

The other way to look at RAWA’s analysis, and practice, is to treat it as a breakthrough in left-wing anti-imperialism, and as an opening to a new women-centered politics. Maybe RAWA’s experience confronting the sharp edge of contemporary neo-colonialism is something we should learn from.

Maybe we can’t postpone the fight against fundamentalism and right-wing populism until “after” we defeat imperialism. Maybe the Left will never defeat the current incarnation of imperialism until we learn how to destroy clerical fascism and its agenda for the enslavement of women. Maybe it’s time to address the fact that a growing populist Right, led by an armed and dangerous fascist vanguard, is working to hijack anti-imperialism and anti-Western struggle away from the Left. (And doing a rather good job of it so far.) Maybe we should really listen to the women of RAWA, and to the other anti-fascist Left forces being forged in the world’s battle zones.

In Europe and North America, some leftists—mostly women—are listening. Even though most of the metropolitan Left doesn’t treat it as a priority, feminists and others on the Left are supporting organizations like RAWA and OWFI. Some are also struggling to develop a new politics of anti-imperialism that explicitly repudiates male domination. Radical thinkers like Marie Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor), Christina Thurmer-Rohr (Vagabonding: Feminist Theory Cut Loose) and Butch Lee (Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, with Red Rover; Jailbreak out of History: the Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman) have tried to advance and modernize women-centered revolutionary politics in the metropolis.

Meanwhile, day by day and in full view of the world, the beat goes on in Iraq. Imperialist war criminals slaughter “anti-imperialist” Baath Party cadres, domestic and international Islamic fascists and local warlords, with absolutely no heed for civilian “collateral damage.” For their own part, reactionary “resistance” fighters, virtually all men devoted to brutal patriarchy, blow up whole city blocks—also with no consideration for civilians who get in the way. Iraqi women, largely pushed off the streets and, increasingly, under the veil, wonder which side will win, and what their fate will be, one way or the other. The small, heroic groups of militants who try to represent women’s own interests in Iraq do their organizing under the most extreme pressures and terrorist threats from both sides.

If there were a strong international Left today, perhaps we would take advantage of the contradiction between the two reactionary camps of modern world capitalism that are at war today. Wouldn’t it be good to let the imperialists and the fascists hammer each other while we built something radical and women-centered and survivable? Perhaps that’s actually starting to happen, on a small scale, where women have decided that they’ve had enough of being fought over by greedy vicious men. Perhaps RAWA is such a start, or OWFI. But this kind of politics certainly isn’t a major force in the world yet. And it definitely isn’t high on the agenda of the international Left or, for that matter, of the anti-war movements in the metropolis.

We live in the early days of a new capitalist era. Today, the Left is weak, the insurgent hard Right is stronger, and the imperialists are strongest. That’s the world balance of forces, whether we like it or not. At the heart of all the contradictions among these three forces is a contest over the fate of the proletariat, especially proletarian women. These women do not yet have a strong, independent, armed, organized presence capable of confronting global oppression on their own terms. That is precisely why the Left is weak: for better or worse, proletarian women’s future is the Left’s future.

The objective conditions for a radical new wave of freedom struggle are growing steadily as the old secrets of patriarchy are forced out of the closet; as class differences between men and women become more obvious; as millions of women are gathered into the heart of a reconfigured proletariat. If and when these women in their hundreds of millions break through the male blockade, entering the world political struggle not as part of somebody else’s agenda but acting directly on their own behalf, they will become the main force of a new international Left, one that will strike fear among fascists and imperialists alike. Isn’t it time that the Western Left started figuring out realistic ways to advance that process, instead of living in perilous denial and grasping at false male dreams of glory?

--Bromma

(Acknowledgement: This article reflects a lot of discussion among activists. It is based substantially on hard work and hard thinking by many others. In particular, it has been strongly influenced by the theoretical insights of Butch Lee and J. Sakai.)RENEGADE EYE

Election Aftermath: Crisis for the Democratic Party

This is part of an article from The World Socialist Web Site, written before the final results were known in the US elections.

While the election result is a debacle for the Bush administration and the Republicans, the Democrats are far from satisfied with the political situation that they presently confront.

The Democratic Party is the beneficiary of overwhelming antiwar sentiment that it did nothing to encourage and which stands in stark opposition to its own pro-war policy. There is a vast chasm between the massive antiwar sentiment within the electorate and the commitment of Democratic Party leaders to “victory in Iraq” and continued prosecution of the “war on terror.”

As the evening wore on and the political implications of the massive anti-Bush and antiwar vote became apparent, both leading Democrats and the cynical spinmeisters of the media sought to interpret the election results in the most conservative and innocuous terms.

New York Senator Hillary Clinton, considered to be the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, declared in her victory speech that American politics had to return to the “vital center,” and pledged her commitment to work with the Republicans in prosecuting the “war on terror.”

Needless to say, had the Republicans retained control of both houses of Congress, the media would have portrayed the election as a powerful popular endorsement of the Bush administration’s war policy.

In fact, the vote reflects the broad and deep popular opposition not only to Bush, but also to the media and the Democrats, both of which backed the administration’s war drive, promoted its lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, and continue to support the mass slaughter being carried out by the US in the devastated country.

The outcome of the elections has revealed that the American people overwhelmingly stand to the left of the entire political establishment. It signals an intensification of the political crisis in the United States.

Those who voted for the Democratic Party in order to express their opposition to the Bush administration and the war will rapidly discover that a Democratic electoral victory will produce no significant change in US policy, either abroad or at home. Millions of working people and youth will sooner rather than later come into direct conflict with the Democrats.

I would add, that the people who will come into conflict, with what they thought the Democrats would deliver, are going to be fooled again as the US presidential election season starts. Expect a Feingold, Edwards, or even Hillary Clinton, to make the Democratic base, think they are listened to.

There was an American president who supported "The Philadelphia Plan", an affirmative action program to increase Afro-Americans getting jobs in construction on federal projects, a full employment budget that ran up deficits, raised Social Security benefits by 20% indexed to the cost of living, created the Enviromental Protection Agency etc. That president was Richard M Nixon. He didn't do that because of discovering social-democracy, rather for the US international image abroad. The point is that whoever is in power, it's the mass movement that applies pressures to get reforms.

In the future I'll post what I'm for electorally, not just attacking Democrats. I do believe the Democratic Party is the main enemy of the left. I would support a labor party based on the working class. I also would support an Afro-American or Chicano nationalist party. The goal is to get people into politics independent of Democrats.RENEGADE EYE

Certainly not justice: on Saddam Hussein’s execution

Clearly, Saddam Hussein has committed crimes against humanity and acts of genocide – many of them whilst on the payroll of western governments. He must be held accountable and justice must be served but not in this way. Not in a sham victor’s court. And not the death penalty.

In a country which has been turned into a swamp and nightmare, the death penalty only further brutalises a brutalised society. It cannot be allowed to take place.

According to Mansoor Hekmat, ‘capital punishment is the most deplorable and appalling form of intentional murder since a political authority, publicly, with prior notice, on behalf of society, with the utmost legitimacy and ruthlessness, decides to murder someone, and announces the date and time of the event.’ (See full interview below.)

*****

Read the Worker-communist Party of Iran's PR and an interview with Mansoor Hekmat on Capital Punishment, the most Deplorable form of Deliberate Murder, below:

On Saddam Hussein’s Death Sentence

On Sunday, November 5 right wing international press outlets published the verdict of Saddam Hussein and his step brother’s death sentences with hysterical jubilation and euphoria. They sold this verdict as ‘serving justice’ on behalf of the victims of Saddam’s criminal rule and declared that people in Iraq, except in ‘the Sunni dominated areas’ celebrated this verdict. They broadcast an image of the Iraqi people as vengeful and supportive of the US government and its army.

The nature of Saddam’s regime and its record is very clear for the people of the world and the majority of people in Iraq. For decent people everywhere, Saddam, Khamenei, the Taliban and Bush are all criminals and, to the same extent, deserve to be brought to justice.

However, this puppet court does not have the right to do so, does not represent the people of Iraq, is not an independent institution nor is it serving ‘justice’ by executing Saddam Hussein. The timing of this verdict which coincides with the USA’s mid-term elections exposes the political motivation of this charade. The court verdict seems to be on order of the US government amidst the electoral contest and an attempt to defuse people’s opposition to Bush’s policies which in the last month alone has brought home more than a hundred body bags to the US.

One day, Saddam Hussein and his co-criminals have to stand trial in an independent and just court with full access to a defence. However, apart from political exploitation of the verdict of the puppet court, this verdict restores the death sentence in Iraq, and this itself reveals the foundations on which ‘project Iraqi freedom’ is to be built upon. The death sentence for Saddam and his brother is the continuation of the invasion of Iraq, destruction of Iraqi society, destruction of civility and life of Iraqi people, the abandonment of the Iraqi people to the mercy of ultra-reactionary groups and re-establishment of state promoted murder in Iraq. This court and its verdict declare the moral and political bankruptcy of the United States government and the allies.

The Worker-communist Party of Iran resolutely opposes capital punishment and fights for its abolition internationally. The execution of prisoners of war only demonstrates the military barbarity and criminality which sees its survival in the continuation of the same crime and order. A humane outlook and opposition to capital punishment is not only for sunny days; on the contrary it must be implemented when criminals are on trial. Defence of human dignity and humanity is not an empty slogan, but must be applied to criminals as well. The restoration of capital punishment has always been argued as an attempt to ‘safeguard society from crime’ but in reality, it has been the main tool of the ruling classes to suppress and physically remove opponents of the dominant force. The hanging of Saddam Hussein and his brother will not reduce even an iota of the miseries of the people of Iraq, but will enhance the dimensions of terror, revenge, vengeance, intimidation and crime. The execution of this verdict, not only moves Iraqi society into another cycle of tribal and religious hatred and confrontation, but in the name of ‘the people of Iraq’ and ‘justice’ will sanction the setting up of gallows to hang citizens and opponents of the pentagon appointed government in Iraq.

Justice has never been achieved with killing and hanging criminals. We must remove the source of injustice and crime. The Worker-communist Party of Iran calls for a vast and comprehensive movement to abolish capital punishment internationally. In opposition to the deceitful actions of the leaders of the ‘New World Order’ and outrageous celebration of ‘freedom of people’ with setting up of gallows, the socialist movement must more than ever before insist on the abolishment of capital punishment and condemn such criminal state policies.

Worker-communist Party of Iran
6 November 2006

Capital Punishment, the most Deplorable form of Deliberate Murder
Interview with Mansoor Hekmat

Question: In its literature, the Worker-communist Party of Iran has clearly spoken about the necessity of abolishing capital punishment. What is the WPI's reasoning behind the necessity of abolishing capital punishment?

Mansoor Hekmat: Capital punishment is the state's terminology for murder. Individuals murder each other, but states sentence individuals to 'capital punishment.' The demand to end capital punishment and prohibit murder stems from opposition to intentional, deliberate and planned murder of one by the other. That a state or ruling political force is responsible does not make the slightest difference to the fact that we are dealing with intentional murder. Capital punishment is the most deplorable and appalling form of intentional murder since a political authority, publicly, with prior notice, on behalf of society, with the utmost legitimacy and ruthlessness, decides to murder someone, and announces the date and time of the event.

Question: With the abolishment of capital punishment, how can grievances be filed against murderers?

Mansoor Hekmat: It is an interesting question. With the abolishment of capital punishment, right from the start, a leading murderer, the state, will immediately be stopped. Your question implies that capital punishment has been invented to file grievances against murderers or that lawmakers found it suitable for the crime of murder after lengthy deliberations. Capital punishment, however, has nothing to do with murder in society. It has its own history. It is the state's rights and powers over citizens today as a continuation of the state's rights and powers in the past. When Agha Mohammad Khan Ghajar blinds and kills residents of an entire town, he is not objecting to a specific crime. When a horse thief in America is hanged or a soldier who has escaped military service is executed, they are not registering a grievance in a judicial sense, but rather they are putting people in their places and forcing them to submit to rules and regulations. They are terrorising people. They are governing. In today's world, capital punishment is not just a so-called punishment for murder, it is also a punishment for unauthorised sex, hoarding, believing in common ownership, forming opposition parties, mocking of god and prophets, homosexuality, etc. From the beginning of state rule, the killing of inhabitants has always been and is a pillar of forcing people into submission. The history of capital punishment is not found in judicial debates about crime and punishment, but rather in the history of class rule and the state. States kill their citizens today. This must be stopped.

You ask if there is no capital punishment, what we can do with murderers. The killing of murderers is a repetition of murder. This cannot be done. What else can be done depends on the judicial philosophy of society. In the current system, a murderer could be imprisoned. Perhaps in an ideal society, people could be protected from the repetition of murder, or the murderer could be made to understand its offensiveness, without even taking away his/her freedom. In an ideal society, it may even be possible to create conditions so that pre-meditated murder does not occur.

Question: How would the WPI treat the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and torturers who are captured and found guilty of murder?

Mansoor Hekmat: There are no capital punishment or life sentences in our system of laws. Clearly, these people should be imprisoned and worked on so that they can return to society and be forgiven.

Question: Without capital punishment, how will families of the murdered obtain justice?

Mansoor Hekmat: The idea that the family of the victim owns the victim's blood and that justice is a debt owed by society is a backward and unacceptable concept. The victim's family's sadness and sorrow is undeniable. But if capital punishment is allowed to appease their sorrows, why is murder not excused for similar emotions? Can anyone who has suffered humiliation, been crushed, lost everything, become a drug addict, bankrupt or homeless commit murder to appease bitter emotions? Is the state a killing machine, which individuals refer to for retribution? Is justice a concept replacing retribution? The meaning of justice should be discussed later. The concept is not so objective and beyond the class system that some might think.

Question: Would not the abolition of capital punishment result in increased crime?

Mansoor Hekmat: No, the reverse. As I said before, the long list of state sponsored murders will immediately stop. The US government and its prosecutors are the busiest professional murderers in that country. The abolishment of capital punishment is like arresting 150 serial killers at once! Furthermore, a society that legally permits the killing of human beings can never prevent its repetition by the general public. The abolition of capital punishment and declaring the value of human life is the first step in the struggle against a culture of murder in society. Official statistics clearly show that in Holland, Scandinavia and Britain where capital punishment are prohibited, the murder rate (in ratio to the population) is far less than in the United States.

Question: In your opinion, what should be the objectives of punishing criminals?

Mansoor Hekmat: I am not sure if punishment is basically a good word for a humane judicial system. In my opinion, aside from prevention and removing the social, economic and cultural bases of crime, society must first, with minimal use of force and minimal deprivation of the offender's normal life, protect itself from the repetition of an offence. Secondly, it must help these individuals transform. I think that retribution and punishments that make examples of persons must be banned. We must reach a point where society so distances itself from violence that it treats it like natural disasters, rushing in to help the victims, making efforts to avoid its repetition and minimise the damage, without sacrificing anyone by throwing them in the volcano or the sea.

Question: If the abolition of capital punishment is to value human life and the right to live, then how do we pursue the demand for the freedom of political prisoners who have killed innocent human beings during the course of their political actions? What should be done to a fighter who has planted a bomb on a bus or other place and consequently killed one or more persons? Must we demand their freedom?

Mansoor Hekmat: I do not call an individual who plants a bomb on buses and planes, a fighter. Unfortunately, for a specific period, this method became popular in some legitimate movements and was later elevated to an art of killing under the guise of politics by some reactionary movements. I do not have general formula to deal with them. It depends on the state they are fighting against, on the judicial standards of the given country and its legal legitimacy and on the conditions under which it occurs. In my opinion, the case of those who bomb non-military targets is not a political case. It is possible to provide secondary political reasons for the crime, but the case is not a political one. However, if those who have attacked non-military targets are to be arrested and tried, several Western presidents and prime ministers, hundreds of American and European bureaucrats, generals and commanders will be the first to be accused. I see no difference between Timothy McVeigh who committed such a massive crime in Oklahoma and those who bombed shelters, schools and houses, killing so many in Baghdad.

Question: Which authority must try these?

Mansoor Hekmat: A power that has legal legitimacy. According to their definition, despotic governments do not have such legitimacy. In my opinion, to try the general Schwartzkopfs and the Bin Ladens, acceptable courts could be found or created even in this bourgeois world.

Question: What is your definition of a political prisoner?

Mansoor Hekmat: In my opinion, there are two categories of political prisoners and prisoners of war, which are relevant to this discussion. A political prisoner is someone who is in prison for opposing a government. Accordingly political prisoners must be freed. There should not be any trial. Anyone who has carried out political activities against a government must not be arrested. Moreover, prisoners of war have not committed any crimes and must not be deprived of their civil rights, including freedom. This of course is not only a matter between states. In my opinion, members of guerrilla organisations who have declared war on states and have been captured must be entitled to the same rights as prisoners of war. Current laws must profoundly be changed in favour of these prisoners. Imprisoning an individual and depriving him/her of their normal life must be banned. But arrangements could be made to prevent the individual from re-joining his/her army until the end of the war or until it is ensured that s/he will not take part in the war again. Finally, we have another concept of war crimes. This concept must be seriously redefined and include all instances in which forces attack non-military and civilian structures. In recent years, we have witnessed the most widespread war crimes committed by western and local governments in different countries such as Iraq and Yugoslavia. There are many war criminals that roam freely among people as leaders, national heroes and patriots who must be tried.

Question: What are the reasons behind Islamic fundamentalists' insistence and eagerness on annihilating and killing their opponents?

Mansoor Hekmat: I have not researched whether someone is first attracted to murdering and then becomes an Islamic fundamentalist or vice versa but I am sure the answer is somewhere in your question.

The above is a summary of an interview first published in Persian in Khavaran, the quarterly of the Organisation in Defence of Political Prisoners in Iran, Fall 2000. It was reprinted in International Weekly No. 26, November 3, 2000. The English version is a reprint from WPI Briefing. Translators: Maryam Namazie and Fariborz Pooya.Maryam Namazie

Renegade Eye Addendum: See Hitchens Denounces Execution of Saddam

No To Cluster Bombs (Online Campaign)

Dear Fellow Comrades and Leftists

This is asking the online humanitarian groups to be active and promote the online petition. You don't have to agree with me on any other issue (as plenty disagree with me politically but we are all humans). If you are opposed to the use of these devastating immoral weapons, please sign the petition. As you some of you know, Israel left inside Lebanon over 1.2 million unexploded cluster bombs in S. Lebanon. The Lebanese Army says that it will take years to take them all out and dismantle them. According to Handicap International , there are currently around 100,00 potential victims due to the unknown locations of cluster bombs. Already around 181 case (according to the Daily Star) have been wounded or killed due to cluster bombs since the end of the war in August 2006.

I also would like to add that Cluster Bombs have been used extensively through out the world, the only ones hurt are not the militants, rather it is the civilians.

Thank you Renegade Eye for allowing me to place this campaign on your blog.

Best Regards and Thank You in Advance

MFL

Memphis Wrestling Legend Sputnik Monroe Passes.

Afro-Americans in Memphis often have three portraits hanging in their homes, Jesus, Martin Luther King and wrestler Sputnik Monroe.

The wrestling legend who was born with the name Rocco Monroe DiGrazio, died on Friday in a Florida nursing home at 78 years old. He had been ill several years, including having half of his lungs removed. His father by blood died in an airplane crash before he was born. His mother remarried, and at 17 years old, he became Rock Monroe Brumbaugh.

His first wrestling name was Pretty Boy Roque, when he started grappling in 1945. His first gimmick was using the name Elvis Rock Monroe. If you say it fast it is Elvis Rock-N-Roll.

Once on the way to a booking, he picked up an Afro-American hitchhiker, and brought him to the arena, where he was wrestling. He was walking arm and arm with him. A racist fan saw that, and called him names. The wrestler kissed the Afro-American hitchiker on the lips. The worse thing she could call him was Sputnik. It was the time the Russians sent Sputnik into space. The promoter kept the Sputnik name, for cold war heat reasons.

It was wrestling in 1957 Memphis, Tennessee where he made history. Until the late 1960s, professional wrestling in the southern USA, was segregated. Afro-Americans only wrestled others. The Afro-American fans sat in the bleachers. According to National Public Radio "Sputnik wasn't about to change anything about himself but his name. He continued to build friendships within the black community, and soon had a huge following. He was a heel, or a bad guy in wrestling parlance, but to his fans, he was a hero. Walking into the ring at Ellis Auditorium in downtown Memphis, he would be booed by many whites, but as soon as they were finished, Sputnik would turn to the top seats, the segregated top balcony, raise his arms, and bring down a groundswell of cheers. Sputnik wanted more of his fans to get into the auditorum, so he bribed a door attendant to miscount the number of African Americans admitted. Soon, there was no place else to sit but in the white section. Whether fans were black or white, promoters could see nothing but green, and with little fanfare, seating at Ellis Auditorium was integrated. Later, he tag-teamed with an African American, Norvell Austin. Many fans said it was the first time they ever saw a black wrestler in the ring."

His 1959 feud with Billy Wicks, set attendance records in Memphis that were never broken until recently.

His work against segregation was honored by the Memphis Rock and Soul Museum. They have one of his ring outfits on display.

Sputnik was an authentic tough guy who boxed, wrestled in carnivals and in arenas. He had his last match at near 70 years old. He never left an opponent feeling better after a match with him. He made Memphis better.

Addendum: In the 1960s on television was a western called "Bat Masterson", starring Gene Barry. He was a gambler, and outlaw fighter who wore a derby and carried a cane and a Derringer pistol. Sputnik was in attendance, when the actor was doing a personal appearance. The wrestler took the cane, and broke it.

See: Sputnik Monroe on NPR
RENEGADE EYE

WHY BLOG?

This post was written by Edie, who writes one of my all time favorite blogs Annotated Life. Her post deals with a question we all ask ourselves. I started my blog because I was angry about the Terry Schiavo affair. I thought science and rationality was under attack. Please visit Edie's blog. She is a great writer, whether she writes about art, current politics or history. Edie is associated with World Socialist Web Site, the most widely read socialist news site.


Why blog? This question is inevitably broached, at least privately, by every serious-minded blogger seeking to clarify or justify the activity.

Many intelligent people take a cynical view of the blogging phenomenon, saying that the reality of the situation is that most bloggers are simply ignorant and shallow. I have been confronted with this position from personal acquaintances who consider themselves to be very leftist, very realistic, very objective about the political climate. Let's face it, they say, bloggers can barely snap their gum and linkjack at the same time.

I think that it is in fact impossible to be realistic with the attitude that most people are just irrecoverably stupid. Far from realistic or objective, it is entirely subjective. One must look at mass activities objectively in order to understand them and recognize their full potential.

So let's be realistic. Blogs are inlets and outlets. Blogs are non-profits or infinitesimal business ventures. They are diaries or megaphones for confessions, creative and political expressions, individualism and romance. Blogs are powerful communication and social networking tools. A blog is a place to work through personal thoughts or dilemmas, often seeking the collaboration, understanding, and disinterested friendship of strangers.

But beyond these explanations, there is the larger trend. Regardless of the rationale for or content of individual blogs, the act of blogging is representative of a trend toward expression and interaction and discussion beyond established media--even as the governing body and structure of our society constricts against this. The Internet is a medium unparalleled in history for the exercise and transmission of free speech.

Currently Technorati tracks around 58 million blogs. MySpace lists more than 105 million blogs. Most of these are no doubt deeply personal. However, a great majority of these, never mind the content, are intricately linked personal forums, and this lends itself to free speech in times of political crisis.

This is why the political and media establishment perpetuates the cynical view of bloggers and more generally, youth, as irretrievably shallow, stupid, consumed by consumerism. It is behavior condemned out of one side of the mouth and encouraged out of the other.

And, more importantly, because social networking has flourished to an extent that was almost inconceivable even a decade ago, the military establishment has expressed concern over what it has termed the "uncontrolled networking" of "the Information Battlespace." Information flows through like a sieve, unapproved in its content and its carriers, unauthorized, instantaneous.

Blogs and user-submitted news sites have proven time after time that they have the capacity to cover world-shaping events with more rapidity and humanity than the embedded media outlets--from riots to tsunamis, elections to hurricanes, war crimes to military coups. Videos and photographs that have surfaced on file-sharing networks have changed public opinion virtually overnight, and have the power to destabilize governments anywhere in the world.

Attempts to rein in this networking have so far focused on corporatizing--buying out, bullying with lawsuits, constructing monolithic rip-offs. The next step, tiering the Internet, is an effort to cede web supremacy to military traffic whenever a crisis is declared. Corporate traffic would get second "tier," and the rest of us could conceivably be cut off altogether if it is deemed necessary for security purposes. Given the political climate of the endless "War on Terror," it almost goes without saying that security purposes for the military can mean the opposite of security for us.

Yet, for all the tough talk, shutting down the Internet is not really a practical option for the government in any circumstance. This is because the integration and simultaneity of global financial markets are also by-products of the telecommunications system, and without it, world capitalism--so overwhelmingly inflated by speculation in the place of real productive power--would collapse.

Why does the political establishment, the government as well as the mainstream media, detest the blog? Why blog?

Blogging is oppositional because it is an alternative vehicle for the dissemination of information. It represents a small but significant cultural evolution of the working class without the sanction of the ruling elite. The establishment fears and dismisses it because the system at large has reached such a state of decay and is now so sclerotic that alternative modes of communication are now recognized as threats.

Similarly, such modest alternatives as third parties and public free speech areas--historically the safety valves of capitalist democracy--are now being suppressed, not because the government is in a position of strength, but because it is vulnerable. The threat of terrorism is invoked, terrorist plots are concocted by the intelligence agencies and heralded by the media as often as necessary not because the position of the ruling elite is stable but precisely the opposite, because the power structure has deteriorated to such an extent that an informed population, living without fear, now represents a threat to capitalism rather than a bulwark of democracy. Capitalism and democracy have been revealed to be incompatible.

Giving legal sanction for torture, information operations including Internet and phone surveillance, development of weaponry intended for domestic crowd control, and record funding for military and police forces are also direct symptoms of this decay.

Why blog? The most politically developed within the working class have a tremendous responsibility set out by history to lead society in a new direction. The Internet offers us a wealth of potential which would be foolish and even tragic to forgo. This is why I blog.RENEGADE EYE

Nothing could be more offensive! On St Andrews University’s invitation to ex-president Khatami

Mr Khatami, a former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1997-2005) has been invited to St Andrews University on October 31 to receive an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws in recognition of his ‘efforts to encourage interfaith dialogue’.

Giving a theocrat a degree in secular law and doing so ‘considering global tensions relating to… faiths’ that incidentally he and his regime have been instrumental in creating is like giving PW Botha or FW De Klerk honorary degrees in race relations in recognition of their efforts to encourage inter-race dialogue!

Nothing could be more offensive, not only to those of us who have fled or lost loved ones to this vile regime but also to the innumerable who have lost lives and limbs to Islamists everywhere.

But there is more. In its attempt to dispel any illusion that it is organising student protests against this action as reported in media outlets [it is the National Union of Students, we and others who are doing so], the University of St Andrews Students’ Association’s statement blatantly and shamelessly defends Khatami and his presidency.

It asserts that Mr Khatami was never the ‘highest ranking political or judicial authority in the land, and held minimal influence...’ Clearly, this is untrue. Saying so is a deliberate attempt at whitewashing his role in the crimes of the Islamic regime of Iran. Power sharing mechanisms in a government, however dictatorial, do not mean that the executive role lacks power.

One case in point is the April 1997 German court’s verdict that found the then president responsible for the September 1992 assassinations of opposition leaders in Berlin. The court found that the killings had been ordered by a ‘Committee for Special Operations’ whose members included the Leader (Khamenei), the president, the Minister of Information and Security and other security officials.

In the past week, too, Argentine prosecutors have issued warrants for a former president for directing Hezbollah to carry out the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds.

And today, there are reports of two Iranian exiles, Safa Einollahi, 29, and Ali Ebrahimi, 34, who have lodged complaints under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act against Khatami for his accountability in the atrocities and tortures they endured as political prisoners.

Far from the rosy picture often portrayed in the Western media, Khatami’s presidency has been anything but.

During his bloody rule, over 1,300 people were executed, including sweet 16 year old Atefeh Rajabi for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’; 27 people were stoned to death or sentenced to die by stoning, 18 of them women; student and other demonstrations were crushed and their leaders arrested or killed; Ahmad Batebi was given a death sentence for holding up a bloody t-shirt; an opposition activist in Kurdistan, Showaneh Qaderi, was shot and his body dragged through the streets; Arezoo Siabi Shahrivar was arrested along with up to 14 other women, at a ceremony commemorating the 1988 “prison massacre” in Evin prison, Tehran, in which thousands of political prisoners were executed. In detention she was suspended from the ceiling, beaten with a wire cable and sexually abused. Journalists and webloggers were detained; papers were shut down; the Canadian journalist, Zahra Kazemi was tortured and murdered in prison; the murders of two political activists and three writers – a case known in Iran as the “Serial Murders” took place; hundreds of labour activists were arrested and tortured and on and on.

Only in a topsy turvy world can a president who oversaw such murder and mayhem not be deemed accountable...

And it was not only his eight years as president that Khatami is accountable for. In the 1980s in the Majlis, Khatami was known as an active member of the Line of the Imam, the dominant grouping within a party set up via Khomeini’s decree and most closely identified with Khomeini’s policies, including his theory of velayat-e faqih, or absolute clerical supremacy in government. Mr Khatami was appointed the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and was the chief censor in film, media, arts and culture. As a member of the Supreme Council on Cultural Revolution, Khatami played an important role in purging dissidents from universities and educational centres. Moreover, he was the director of cultural affairs in the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the head of the War Propaganda Headquarters for years. Today, too, he remains a member of several organs of the Islamic regime.

Absurdly, though, whilst being declared powerless, Khatami is also always lauded as a reformer; the St Andrews Students’ Association's statement asserts that he "strove for moderation and liberalisation whilst in office". This is a contradiction in terms.

One cannot have minimal influence and be a reformer at the same time. Moreover, reforms have a specific meaning in our world – changes, particularly in law, which improve the lot of the population at large. Again, this was never the case. In fact, Khatami and his ‘reformist’ faction were merely attempts by the regime to put forward a more palatable face in order to prolong its life given the explosive situation in Iran.

***

In the face of escalating protests and opposition to Khatami’s visit, the university persists in its decision to confer an honorary degree upon him and in its rewriting of contemporary history. A spokesperson for the university has said the decision to invite Khatami was based on his “vision and willingness to change”. At least Chancellor Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democratic leader, has pulled out from presenting the degree before it turns into a scandal for him.

But this is not enough.

Far from honouring him with a degree, Khatami should be arrested for his crimes against the people of Iran.

On Tuesday, we will be there at St Andrews to remind the world that we will not allow it to forget what has taken and is taking place in Iran. We ask students and professors alike, along with concerned and outraged people everywhere to join us in preventing a centre of science from being transformed into a bastion of reaction.

And on this note, it is apt to end with Khatami’s own words at Harvard University this past September when questioned about the execution of gays in Iran:

We’re at a university, the cradle of science, so we can speak of it scientifically...In all schools of thought and in all religions there is punishment and punishment is not a form of violence...Punishment is seen as a response to violence or deviance in society and if there is no punishment in a society a society cannot run effectively…’

And that is Khatami’s unchanged vision pure and simple..Maryam Namazie

Renegade Eye Addendum: In addition see Protest against Mohammad Khatami's visit to Britain!