This is from the Detroit Milion Worker March list.
CB
^^^^^^
Comrades and Friends,
Well, everyone seems to be avoiding talking about it, so I'll give it a go. I'll do it short and sweet in list form. Not too brilliant a style, but quicker. I put this forward to outline an approach to use to counter the ultra-right and the confusion and mixed feelings of the average American :
* The events of 9/11 were NOT a new beginning in any genuine sense.
EVERYTHING was not differeent after 9/11. These events were merely the continuation of a conflict between imperial capitalist nations and the ex-colonial, semi-colonial nations and peoples of the Middle East that had been going on since the 1800's.
* WE were NOT attacked first. The events of 9/11 (whatever you think of them) were in fact a fairly mild response QUANTITATIVELY, to decades and decades of domination, oppression, exploitation, and violent attacks upon Middle Eastern peoples by Western imperialist nations and the servile/proxy/collaborationist regimes in the region that the imperialists had created, placed and kept in power, and used for a long time. WHY ? OIL, cheap labor, strategic/military positioning, control of scarce water resources, and, in its time, "anti-communism" ( ie: Keeping all the wealth in mega corporate hands and out of the hands of the people themselves). Israel is a key puppet regime in this regard, but so are many (if not most)of the Arab regimes.
* While we can argue about whether or not the methods and tactics of attacking innocent rank and file civilians of your enemy nation is justified at any time ( I don't think so -- its self defeating, a provocation, nonproductive as far as building real mass anti-imperialist forces, gives the imperialists an excuse to carry out wars they would havce a hard time justifying otherwise, and are just plain inhumane), the fact is that if you add up the bodies and list the horrors down through the decades, the imperial nations are guilty of 1000's of times more atrocities against innocent civilians (in and out of the Mid East) than the so-called "terrorists" could ever hope to be in their wildest dreams.
Terrorism is terrorism, whether delivered by napalm, "smart" bombs", mass carpet bombing, US trained secret police, US trained death squads, atrocities by imperialist troops, and blitzkrieg invasions OR by individuals carrying explosives blowing up busses and clubs, etc., and setting up improvised explosive devices ( and who knows how many of these incidents are actually carried out by provocateurs and even imperial troops and intelligence agents ?).
* The fundamentalist fanatics in the Mid East, to the extent that they are dangerous reactionaries and not resistance fighters, are as strong as they are as a direct result of the long term policies of US and other Western imperial powers. Such as : + Direct US arming and training of them during the Afghan war of the 1980's against a popular and progressive government that committed the crime of being friendly to the Soviet Union and asking the SU for military help AFTER the US CIA sponsored movement of these fanatics started a campaign of terror. These US "allies" wanted to maintain the opium trade and to keep girls from going to school, among other wonderful attributes. THE TALIBAN AND AL CAIDA were direct descendents of these US alllies. Osama Bin Laden was a good friend of the CIA in Afghanistan and was on their payrol for years. Most of what he learned about irregular warfare he learned from the CIA and the special forces of the US military. You do the math ... + The regimes in the Mid East that the US sponsored/sponsored were systematically pushed over a long time to destroy any and all Left wing/progressive/secular democratic forces that existed within their borders. This left an inevitable vacuum that the fanatic fundamentalists only were left to fill as far as any kind of militant resistance.
* Saddam Hussein was placed in power through a CIA assisted coup aimed at the overthrow of a popular and progressive nationalist regime in Iraq in the 1960's ( and aimed at the destruction of the Iraqi Communist Party) that wanted to strictly nationalize oil resources and reap the financial gains for domestic modernization and social advancement purposes.
Hussein was given the seeds of weapons of mass destruction, when he actually had them, by the US government to use against Iran in the horrible 1980's war between Iraq and Iran, a war pushed by the US to get even against the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran. Anything reactionary (as opposed to much that was progressive) that Hussein was and did was a direct result of US actions and intrigues.
* The US helped set up the coming to power of the Irani Islamic republic ( however you view this regime) by, once again, staging a CIA coup in the 1950's against a popular and elected government that had progressive intentions for Iranian oil resources. The coup put the Shah in power and issued in a period of over 20 years of brutal repression during which the Iranian Left was all but decimated and the people subjected to unspeakable violence and police terror ( courtesy of training by the School of the Americas in Georgia). The fundamentalists came to power in 1979 due to a popular uprising AND the lack of a Left or secular/progressive alternative existing anymore.
So, the events of September 11, 2001, were in fact the long coming result of US, British, French, German, and other imperial power policies and crimes going back over a hundred years, especially since the end of WW I. They brought it on themselves -- or rather, they brought it on 3000 hapless civilians who paid for the sins of the rulers.
I don't personally find such actions against civilians to be justified or valuable or productive as far as building the kind of anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist forces that I want to see. And they are just wrong. Dramatic, adventurous, violent actions like this have a long history of making it harder to build real movements, and they give the ruling class an open excuse to whip up war hysteria and set up police state machinery. Conspiracies like this by small, tight groups are a product of petty bourgeois and bourgeois consciousness that is against socialism and that show a lack of trust in the idea of building mass movements and carrying out progressive revolutionary change from below.
But, given the history of imperialist oppression in the world, one can understand the hatred that such people feel. None of it will be changed progressively by the imperial rulers. No one will be brought over to progressive democratic ideas by the imperialists. They will only, can only, continue to create more monsters and wreak more havoc for us all.
Jim