[Marxism] a thought on bombay/mumbai attacks

[Aaron Aarons]

>Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:09:30 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
>From: Walter Lippmann <walterlx at earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re: [Marxism] a thought on bombay/mumbai attacks
>
>The IRA was operating as a liberation force in an occupied country. India is not under occupation, and hasn't been since about 1948.

Kashmir IS under occupation, and has been since 1948. It seems that the attackers were from Kashmir. At least the one who spoke to the media from the occupied Zio-Nazi (Chabad) building spoke about Kashmir.

>Further, the IRA came to realize that they could not win the war against the British occupation by military means, and they changed their tactics.

As Bernadette Devlin pointed out after the Awful Friday agreement, they didn't just change their tactics, which would have been correct, but they sold out their principles in exchange for the incorportation of their leadership into the ruling apparatus.

>Armed violence has declined in Northern Ireland in the subsequent years, though the carping critics of SINN FEIN and the IRA have not stopped their carping criticism. The simple fact was that the IRA could not obtain the removal of British occupation by military means, so they shifted gears and tactics.

So now Britain doesn't NEED to maintain a military occupation in Northern Ireland since SINN FEIN is helping them maintain their political and economic domination, and the partition of Ireland, much more cheaply. Something to celebrate, Walter?

>That's exactly what happened in South Africa, too, where the ANC wasn't able to defeat the apartheid regime militarily, so they made a deal with it to end white minority rule, but leaving the system of capitalism in place. The ANC has received endless criticism for that, too, but by people who couldn't by themselves, continue the armed struggle.

The main form of struggle against the white-domination-with-a-white-face regime was mass struggle, especially mass strikes. It was not possible, in the face of such mobilization, for that regime to impose the kind of neo-liberal policies that the white-domination-with-a-Black-face regime of the ANC has managed to impose, leaving the Black masses materially worse off, both absolutely and relative to whites, than they were under the openly white regime.

If Walter wants to call the denunciation of sell-outs like Sinn Fein and the ANC "carping criticism",  he's only reminding us that his politics stink like a long-dead carp.

>Colombia today is in a similar situation where the revolutionary armed forces are strong enough to retain control over some parts of the country, but not in a position to win the struggle militarily. Something else has to change the political equation. Perhaps the big crisis now developing their with the financial ripoff which so many have experienced might provide an element which might open a new door. That's hard to determine, but Colombia's ruling party is in even more disarray in recent days. Check this out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/95766
>
>Fidel Castro has written at great length on this topic, including an entire three hundred (ok, just 297) page book, but check this: http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2008/ing/f050708i.html
>
>Fanon's writings provide essential understanding of the rage of the oppressed, and I've not been one to condemn the tactics of fighters against occupation and oppression. But tactics and principles are not the same thing. If you cannot win through one tactic, sometimes you need to try another. Washington is now considering changing some of its tactics of isolation and blockade against Cuba, too. Cuba will respond in its way, on its timetable and in its interest, too.

Neither Washington nor Cuba is homogeneous. One can only hope that the smart imperialists in Washington won't be able to find a sufficiently strong opportunist sector in the Cuban leadership that they can encourage to move Cuba in a Chinese- or Vietnamese-style direction.

>Osama Bin Laden's attack on the World Trade Center

Is the official 9/11 conspiracy theory allowed to be promulgated on this list while questioning of it is ruled out? Anyway, what Walter writes is not the 100%-official theory since, last time I checked,  the FBI's wanted poster for Bin Laden didn't even mention the 9/11 attacks and there was no mention of a connection between Bin Laden and those attacks anywhere on the FBI site.

> was not an act of resistance against oppression. It was an attack on the people of the United States.

Supposing, back in 2003 (or even in 1991), some Iraqi group had had the ability to carry out similar attacks repeatedly, and had announced that they would carry out one such attack for each 3,000 Iraqis killed by the U.S.. Would they have been justified in not only threatening but carrying out such attacks, presuming they didn't have the capacity to make their attacks more selective? My answer is an unqualified YES!

>Apparently that is not an assessment which JSCOTLIVE can agree with. We cannot win over the people of the United States if we mince words about this kind of an attack on them.

I can't speak for jscotlive, but I have no desire to pander to any nationalistic or patriotic sentiments of the people of the United Snakes. Rather, my desire is to help win a small but substantial section of that population to active subversion of "their own" country. I think it was at the one-year anniversary memorial at U.C. Berkeley, when I still accepted the official conspiracy theory, that I carried a sign that didn't mince words: "Hundreds of Innocents Died for What 'America' Had Coming". (I always put 'America' in quotes, or write it as 'AmeriKKKa', to make it clear that the United Snakes is not all of America, which runs from Canada to Tierra del Fuego.)

 - Aaron

>Walter Lippmann
>Los Angeles, California