[lbo-talk] Islamofascism Awareness Week

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Wed Oct 24 01:50:55 PDT 2007


On 10/24/07, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> And during that same period, didn't much of the radical Western left
> support
> the Red Army wiping out about a million Afghans, the majority of whom, I'm
> guessing, were Muslims? Now they're seen as the Afghan "resistance."
>
> I know, I know -- Soviet policy was more progressive than US imperialism,
> as
> they were trying to establish a secular base in a backward and very poor
> country. So, if a major "socialist" state was currently bombing Taliban
> strongholds (along with the inevitable civilian dead), we'd be behind it?

Fred Halliday, who supported the Soviet occupation (with some criticisms), argues:

"To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we're now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century. It was the kitchen in which the contradictions of the contemporary world, and many of the violent evils of the century, were cooked and then spread out. Just as Italian and German fascism trained in Spain for the broader conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean,the militant jihadi Islamists, of whom bin Laden was a part, received their training, their primal experiences, in Afghanistan. They have been carrying out this broad jihad across the Middle East and elsewhere ever since, including, of course, the attacks of September 11th. You cannot understand this unless you go back to Afghanistan in the 1980s.

"But who was responsible? Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Read Bob Woodward's book on Casey, The Veil, or Steven Cole's book on Afghanistan, Ghost Wars. The U.S. was deeply implicated. My view is that anybody who could not see that issue then, or in retrospect, is objectively on the Right. And I think Tariq is objectively on the Right. He's colluded with the most reactionary forces in the region, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. He has given his rhetorical support to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq—who have no interest in democracy or in progress for the people of Iraq whatsoever, whether it's the Baathists, with their record of 30 years of dictatorship, or the foreign Sunnis with their own authoritarian project. The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah." http://www.alexandria-press.com/online/online54_postel_interview_with_fred_halliday.htm

In other words, he thinks the Left should support the bombing of Afghanistan because the historically 'progressive' forces are in charge. It's a really crummy stageist version of marxism that the likes of Hitchens and Halliday appeal to all the time.



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