(If anyone is a passionate supporter of Tariq Ali I will immediately withdraw what could be seen as a flame)
The article does point to very worrying developments but seems to be pitched at the level of whether certain individuals have integrity or not.
As US dominance grows disproportionately, and the attack on the World Trade Centre appears to justify imposing its will everywhere, the barriers of state sovereignty have been breached.
We are not quite at the point of a NATO occupation force demobilizing the Zimbabwe state forces and organising a democratic election after a suitable interval of one year, but we may be only a few years away from it.
The sort of hard question that lists like this need to share is indeed how do we resist the current trends in practice. I was one of those in a minority vocally, but you never know about the majority on a busy list, who believed that the communal violence in the former Yugoslavia was so serious and so harmful for any sense of proletarian internationalism, that the west should intevene, like it should have intervened against Nazi Germany.
*However* despite the objectionable human rights record of the Mugabe regime, I suspect I am in a minority on this list again, judging from the lack of support he is receiving here (and on more ostensibly revolutionary lists, which shall remain nameless). I see him in a different light to Milosevic. The struggle to take over white colonial land in Zimbabwe in the face of IMF support of property law, is not enormously revolutionary but it is just. The rich "international community" could have defused a lot of the argument by agreeing compensation arrangements a long time ago, except perhaps they would have feared a precedent.
I therefore see Mugabe's struggle from this point of view as progressive, even if it "runs counter to the demands of formal democracy" .
Nevertheless instead of Tariq Ali making snide remarks about different brands of former marxists, we need to face up to the fact that there are going to be more cases of interference in the internal affairs of other countries in the name of democratic rights, and that national resistence to these will be difficult.
Like Dennis I tend to see the struggle against US hegemonism and imperialism, has to be conducted now to a considerable extent in terms of regional power blocs.
We are therefore in a position similar to that summarised in Foundations of Leninism where "the struggle of the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism."
Translate this from a national level to a regional level and the point may still be valid.
Tariq Ali would of course not stoop to shaking hands with an Egyptian bourgeois intellectual but he does at least increasingly appear on panel programmes on British television. Idiot, no. Opportunist? I leave the list to judge how principly he has answered the question he has posed. We will let him off commenting on the principle quoted from Foundations of Leninism. Because Stalin had an appalling human rights record, Ali will not be able to see that this extract from a summation of Leninism might have been loyal and accurate, and have been part of a culture, perhaps wrong in important respects, but a consistent culture of the successor parties to the Third International.
The task is to consider now in a principled way how the struggle within countries, within regions, and on a world level can be advanced by the multitude of progressive people.
Chris Burford
London
At 15/03/02 18:22 -0800, you wrote:
>The new empire loyalists
>
>Former leftists turned US military cheerleaders are helping snuff
>out its traditions of dissent
>
>Tariq Ali
>Saturday March 16, 2002
>The Guardian
>
>Exactly one year before the hijackers hit the Pentagon, Chalmers
>Johnson, a distinguished American academic, staunch supporter of
>the US during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and one-time senior
>analyst for the CIA, tried to alert his fellow-citizens to the
>dangers that lay ahead. He offered a trenchant critique of his
>country's post-cold war imperial policies: "Blowback," he
>prophesied, "is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it
>sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has
>sown.