[Marxism] Tariq Ali's useful response to the terrorist attack in Mumbai

[Aaron Aarons]

>Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:13:17 -0500
>From: "Fred Feldman" <ffeldman at bellatlantic.net>
>
>I think this article can help get us off the axis of debating people who think killing bourgeois and middle-class people who collaborate or are held by some analyst to collaborate with the imperialists or the capitalists or with other middle class people or people who clean the toilets and sweep the floors of those who deserve to be killed and therefore also have deserved death or whatever, and destroying bourgeois hotels and railway stations as positive in principle (as long as they are seriously damaged which is not a hard minimum program to meet, to put it mildly).

AA: Who are the people who you are debating here by not debating them, but instead putting words into their collective mouths? How about being honest and actually quoting what people you are attacking actually said?

FF: > I think it is ridiculous to make statements that people in oppressed nations, and in especially in soecially oppressed sections of oppressed nations cannot afford to be choosy about the tactics and strategy they carry out. In fact they are very choosy. Those who carried out these actions rejected correct (and therefore more humane and more expressive of human solidarity among the oppressed) strategies in favor of ones that have strengthened only the enemy, at great cost in human life and with nothing to show for it strategically except lots of headlines.

AA: Again, please quote who and what you are refuting, Fred. And please, when talking about the "great cost in human life" of any action, good or bad or in between, please keep it in perspective with the thousands of people around the world who are murdered by capitalism every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year. The most effective way that people like us who have no influence whatever over Islamists can limit the ability of the rulers to use these events for their own purposes is to constantly remind people of this reality.

FF: > Of course people who support such actions if they think they work allow themselves only one alternative option -- declaring them "false flag" operations which were entirely organized by the imperialists themselves. If they don't say (a -- all hail the heroic resistance), the must say (b--expose the CIA plot). Sometimes they shift tracks from one to the other as it becomes clear the results of the action have been entirely harmful.

AA: I, for one, are perfectly willing to admit that not all allegedly anti-imperialist actions of which I disapprove are false flag operations. I believe that the 11 September 2001 actions were false flag operations, partly because I don't think they could have been carried out without the cooperation of insiders, most likely agents of a certain "friendly" Middle Eastern country.

On the other hand, the Mumbai attacks, which (on the basis of more information than I had originally) I do not support, were within the competence of an NGO.

FF: > Anyway, the real debate is not the criminal behavior of a few Islamists or people who have adopted one or another chauvinist anti-popular strategy to express their loathing for their rulers and those they regard as enemies, but the ultimate responsibility of the imperialist and their national bourgeois satraps. They will use these events to deepen the conditions that produce them.

As has been made clear in the aftermath of 9/11, where many many millions worldwide, including across the colonial world, were willing to solidarize with the United States if it sought justice, but responded with outrage when the United States rulers insisted that domination was the only "justice " that mattered to them.

AA: Only wannabe "Americans", people brainwashed by the Murdoch media, and just plain fools could have been willing to "solidarize with the United States" in that situation, since they would not have needed to read the sign I carried at a demo that night in Oakland to know that, on the evening of 9-11, "The United States [was] Still the World's Greatest Terrorist."

>Fred Feldman

 - Aaron

P.S. At 00:38 +0800 2008/11/29, Leonard Chua wrote from the Philippines:

>From where I am located, I ask, can you blame us, the wretched of the earth, if we are not so squeamish when we see horror, but also daring and imagination, in acts of terror?

AA: I suspect that this was a more common reaction to the 11 September 2001 attacks among the poor of the oppressed nations and groups than was being "willing to solidarize with the United States if it sought justice"! Even in the U.S., this reaction was not uncommon, especially among oppressed groups. If we heard more of the reaction that Fred describes than of the one expressed by Leonard Chua, it is probably because (1) the pro-U.S. reaction was most common among the classes that have most access to the media and (2) many people were cautious about possible persecution by the powerful if they expressed sympathy for "terrorism".