In September 2015, the image of little Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a beach in Turkey, temporarily jolted the conscience of European politicians who had been preoccupied up until then with turning back the tide of refugees from Syria. The compassion and kindness of those who welcome refugees to their countries is certainly admirable, especially in contrast with the cruelty of the far right, which seeks to exclude them. We must ask, however: is this enough? As a member of the Syria Campaign pointed out soon afterwards:
Since the picture of Aylan hit headlines across the world, 6 children have been killed in Syria every day – the majority from barrel bombs and missiles from Syrian government aircraft. But their bloodied and blown apart corpses don’t make the front page of any newspaper. None of the other 10,000 children killed in the fighting have. What broke my heart this week was a cartoon by Neda Kadri, a Syrian artist, that pictured Aylan in heaven being welcomed by children: ‘you are so lucky Aylan! We’re victims of the same war but no one cared about our death.’ (Nolan 2015)
Despite the tendency of the mainstream media to conflate ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’, it is important to remember that they are different. Refugees are fleeing violence. Therefore, the only viable solution to the refugee crisis would be to end the violence that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.
That is, however, easier said than done. Ending the Syria crisis would entail, first and foremost, identifying its causes. For some of those who call themselves anti-imperialists, there is only one cause: Western (that is, North American and Western European) imperialism, which is responsible for all the bloodshed, including the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),[i] which, according to them, is responsible for most of the violence in Syria. An example of this argument is an article in the Guardian by Seamus Milne (2015) titled ‘Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq’.
Milne supports his allegation by referring to a recently declassified US intelligence file, in order to claim that the US ‘effectively welcomed’ a Salafi principality in Iraq and Syria. Yet the document actually says the following:
If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria … The deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows: This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria … ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and protecting its territory. (Judicial Watch 2015, emphasis added)
It is surely a perverse reading of such phrases as ‘the situation unravels’, ‘deterioration’, ‘dire consequences on the Iraqi situation’ and ‘grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and protecting its territory’ to say that it constitutes an effective welcome of this outcome. Attributing this to Obama is also strange, given that the usual criticism of him by human rights defenders is that the drone strikes in his relentless war on Al Qaeda and ISIS killed hundreds of civilians (Serie 2016).
After describing ISIS and Nusra Front gains, Milne observes, ‘Some Iraqis complain that the US sat on its hands while all this was going on.’ He doesn’t make it clear where he stands on this issue, but the general tenor of his article suggests that he sympathises with the complaint. Who was complaining? A year earlier, then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had publicly called on the US to bomb ISIS (Freeman 2014), and subsequently the Iraqi government had complained that the US was not providing air support to Iranian troops and Shia militias attempting to retake Tikrit from ISIS (Barnard 2015a). The Obama administration reportedly feared that there would be large-scale civilian casualties and revenge attacks on Sunni civilians by the Iranian troops and Shia militias, who were already abducting, torturing and killing Sunni civilians with impunity (Cockburn 2014). In fact, the Iraqi government’s complaint contradicts Milne’s claim that the US was mounting ‘joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq’: what the Iran-backed militias were complaining of was precisely that the US was not coordinating with them.
By this stage, one is totally confused about what Milne is advocating. Does he want the US to ignore pleas from the Iraqi government and stop bombing ISIS? Or to bomb more indiscriminately and kill more civilians as demanded by Maliki and the sectarian Shia militias? He castigates the US for bombing some rebels while supporting others in Syria, which apparently makes no sense to him except as a divide-and-rule tactic. But does he really think that ISIS and the Kurdish PYD/YPG would be together if not for the US bombing one and supporting the other? He does not distinguish between them, but to any informed observer it would be evident that their interests are very different. Throughout this discussion, he scrupulously avoids mentioning the pro-democracy uprising in Syria which is being attacked brutally by the state, thereby helping to cover up the mass murder unleashed by Bashar al-Assad (see Chapter 7).
Milne ends by saying that it is the people of the region who can solve its problems, but it is precisely these people who are conspicuous by their absence from his article. Not a single Iraqi or Syrian civilian is quoted. Perhaps he did not have the resources to meet them, but could he not at least quote from reports of those who did? If he had bothered to look for or listen to the voices of these civilians, he would, for example, have come across a blog post slamming the Obama administration not for providing weapons to the Syrian opposition but for its arms blockade against it, along with a long list of Friday slogans, including many condemning Assad’s atrocities and Hezbollah, Iran and Russia for their complicity in them (NotGeorgeSabra 2013). He would have come across a photograph of Syrians holding up a banner responding to Obama’s patronising and ignorant refusal to arm the Syrian opposition that says, ‘Yes, Mr President Obama! Dentists, farmers and students are the ones who lead dignity revolutions; criminals kill while idiots talk’ (Karadjis 2014). And surely these Syrians are right: Che Guevara was a doctor, Camilo Torres a priest, and many of the Vietnamese who battled against US imperialism were farmers and students, yet they all took up arms against intolerable oppression. Moreover, all Syrian adult males have been through compulsory military service, and many of those fighting against the regime are defectors from the regime’s army, so they have received training to handle weapons.[ii]
Jacob Siegel, in an article analysing responses to the intelligence report cited by Milne, debunked the way in which ‘Hawks and anti-imperialists alike are flogging a recently declassified U.S. intelligence report. Depending on who’s spinning it, the report either proves that Washington ignored dire warnings about the rise of ISIS or that the U.S. was in a secret alliance that fueled the jihadi army’s rise’ (Siegel 2015). In fact, careful analyses of this intelligence file by Michael Karadjis and Gilbert Achcar suggest that it probably reports inputs from an Iraqi regime informant, explaining its understandable anxiety about the effects on Iraq (Karadjis 2015). But even after Siegel’s critique, Seema Mustafa (2015) published a cruder version of Milne’s allegations. What is most striking is the convergence of these self-professed socialists with the far right, including Donald Trump, who made exactly the same allegation of ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. As Trump put it, ‘He’s the founder of ISIS’ (Corasaniti 2016).
Another example of this type of argument is Brad Hoff’s article, ‘ISIS leader Omar al-Shishani fought under US umbrella as late as 2013’ (Hoff 2015). Anyone reading this article would conclude that al-Shishani, trained by the US, continued to be supported by the US when he entered Syria and fought under the banner of ISIS in the battle for Menagh Airbase under US-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA) Colonel Abdul Jabbar al-Okaidi who, according to Hoff, ‘had been in a position of operational command over ISIS terrorists’.
If one takes the trouble to check just one of the references in his article, it becomes clear that it is an understatement to say that Hoff’s account is economical with the truth. The reference describes how al-Shishani – a Georgian named Tarkhan Batirashvili with a Chechen mother – had started off a follower of the moderate Sufi Islam prevalent in Chechnya and Georgia, as a teenager had fought alongside Chechen separatists, before being trained by the US to fight against Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. After being sent to prison by the Georgian authorities because they feared he had been radicalised, he was released, travelled to Turkey and from there to Syria, where he formed the Jaish al-Muhajireen to fight against Assad. In August 2013, he led the assault on the Menagh Airbase in collaboration with the FSA. Only in November 2013 did he join ISIS and start targeting FSA units, much to the dismay of some of the Syrians who had formerly fought under him, who at this point broke with him (Prothero 2015). So the allegation that al-Okaidi was ‘in operational command over ISIS terrorists’ is a lie on two counts: firstly, he was not in command over al-Shishani or the latter’s fighters; secondly, at the time they fought alongside each other, al-Shishani (later killed by US bombs) was not in ISIS.
Milne, Mustafa and Hoff are not the only ‘so-called anti-imperialists’ who align themselves with the Assad regime and ‘relentlessly slander the uprising every step of the way in every conceivable way’ (NotGeorgeSabra 2013). An article by Shamus Cooke, which alleges that ‘For well over two years ISIS and other al-Qaeda-style groups have been the main driving force in the Syrian war’ (Cooke 2014), is effectively demolished by Michael Karadjis (2014), who provides ample evidence that ‘the only force in the region, apart from the Syrian Kurds, who have been fighting ISIS are the FSA and its allies,’ and that ‘They have been the “driving force” in the revolt against the regime, not ISIS’. Like Milne and Mustafa, Cooke covers up the fact that over 90 per cent of the killings are by Assad’s forces (The Syria Campaign 2015), and thereby becomes another accomplice of his crimes against humanity.
The overall message from the omissions, distortions and outright lies in such accounts is that, firstly, there is no democratic opposition to Assad; and secondly, that it is the West, due to its support for extremist Islamists, that is responsible for most of the current bloodshed in Iraq and Syria, not the Assad regime, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shia militias, and the Iranian and Russian forces. These writers cover up the real causes of the massive refugee exodus, enabling the war crimes and crimes against humanity to continue, leading to more deaths, continuing Islamist radicalisation, and the continuing outflow of refugees. By implying that the Sunnis (including little children) being slaughtered by Assad and his allies are all Islamist extremists, they endorse collective punishment of all Sunnis for the crimes of ISIS.[iii] In the eyes of blogger NotGeorgeSabra, this is part of an ‘imperialist-anti-imperialist alliance [which] … speaks with one voice, endlessly repeating a narrative on Syria that is so at odds with the truth: that extremists are the only/main actors in the Syrian opposition; that brutality, torture, sectarianism, and atrocities are the only/main activities of the opposition; that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel are the only/main sponsors or beneficiaries of opposition activism’ (NotGeorgeSabra 2013). It is worth noting that their critics are just as critical of Western powers, but for exactly the opposite reasons.
I have taken the example of Syria in this introduction because, on the one hand, anyone with an iota of humanity would agree that the massive humanitarian catastrophe there should be ended, while on the other, most accounts conceal the real causes of it, and by doing so, provide support for the main perpetrators to continue their mass murder. The Syria Campaign highlights that it is scarcely registered on the internet that well over 90 per cent of the killings in Syria have been perpetrated by the Assad regime, and asks, ‘Why has the world chosen to ignore Assad’s crimes? Is it because he claims to be a secular leader? Is it because he is clean shaven and wears a suit? Is it because we don’t realise that by ignoring these crimes by the regime, we are becoming recruiting cheerleaders for Isis?’ (The Syria Campaign 2015). The reference to ‘becoming recruiting cheerleaders for Isis’ links to a report of the Syrian regime’s bombing of a market in Douma on August 16, 2015, killing at least one hundred civilians and wounding many more, which comments, ‘While much is made of the vaunted propaganda of the Islamic State, there is nothing the group could produce that will draw as many supporters or recruits as Assad’s atrocities’ (The Soufan Group 2015). In fact, as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7, the Assad regime is responsible for supporting ISIS in more direct ways too.
How has this happened? How have some anti-imperialists, who in 2003 exposed the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and stood in solidarity with the oppressed people of Iraq, ended up repeating the lies of the oppressors in Syria and vilifying the oppressed? The Syrian case is only the biggest of the humanitarian disasters that have been facilitated in this way by people who call themselves anti-imperialists. There are others, including one – the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine – where they actually support imperialism.
‘Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed,’ John Pilger (2014) tells us. According to him, the ‘Russians defended themselves’ against ‘threat and invasion from the west’ as well as ‘fascist forces’ launching ‘attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine’ – a curiously uncritical regurgitation of Russian propaganda justifying their invasion of Ukraine from the east. As Nina Potarskaya, a socialist feminist participant in the Maidan movement, explained, anger at social and economic deterioration
exploded after the non-ratification of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, which led to the first Maidan demonstrations, towards the end of November 2013. And every two or three weeks that followed, the evolution of the political situation provoked an escalation, as a growing number of people were taking over the streets, especially after special police forces began to beat and even kill demonstrators. The situation was different in the East, because Russian-speaking people, who are predominantly listening to Russian media, populate the Eastern part of Ukraine, and their information about Maidan had nothing to say about the actual reasons for these protests. They heard about an uprising led by neo-Nazis, which had to be stopped by all means. Of course, the far right played an important role at Maidan, but it was wrong to say that it was a right-wingers movement. (Potarskaya and Batou 2014)
Indeed, the results of the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of October 2014, in which the right-wing parties fared very poorly (Pifer 2014), confirm Potarskaya’s claim.
Pilger fails to mention that the overwhelming majority in the Ukrainian parliament, and even former President Viktor Yanukovych himself, had supported the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU (Euronews 2013) until the Russian government twisted their arms by suspending imports from Ukraine in August 2013, leading to the cancellation of the agreement (EU observer 2013) and the subsequent Maidan protests. He seems unable to comprehend that popular protests against elected representatives who fail to carry out their mandate or become agents of a foreign power are not a ‘coup’ but, on the contrary, evidence of a thriving democratic current in civil society. And if he thinks that ‘Washington’ could have ‘masterminded’ (as opposed to having supported) those massive demonstrations, he must believe that ‘Washington’ is all-powerful and that most Ukrainians would passively accept being ruled from Moscow. He seems to be ignorant of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, in which Russia, in return for Ukraine giving up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, undertook to ‘respect the independence, sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine,’ and to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine’ (StopFake 2016) – undertakings which Putin violated when he annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. According to the same logic, the 1979 overthrow by the Sandinistas of Anastasio Somoza, the ‘democratically elected’ president of Nicaragua, would also have to be classified as a ‘coup,’ ‘masterminded’ by Moscow and Havana. At the time, Pilger, along with other anti-imperialists, supported the Sandinistas – so why the double standard?
In fact, it was the movement in the East that could more accurately be described as ‘fascist’. In his preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Lenin made it clear that he considered Ukraine to have been colonised by Russian imperialism (see Chapter 1). It became an independent Soviet Socialist Republic after the revolution, only to be subordinated to Russia once again within a few years. In the 1930s, Stalin’s policies of mass murder of Ukrainian intellectuals and priests, and forcible extraction of grain from Ukrainian peasants even as millions of them starved to death between 1932 and 1933 alone, were described by Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term ‘genocide’, as ‘the classic case of Soviet genocide’ (Lemkin 1953, Coates 2014).[iv]
Given this history, it is not surprising that in 1991 over ninety per cent of Ukrainians voted for independence from the Soviet Union, with majorities in every region including Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, where Russian speakers are the majority (Lalpychak 1991). Over the long years of Russian and Soviet rule, Russians had settled in Ukraine, especially in the East, and in some cases intermarried with Ukrainians; these people and their descendants became Ukrainian citizens. They surely had a right to continue to use their own language, but the idea that the areas in Eastern Ukraine where they were concentrated should be part of Russia is akin to Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia on the grounds that it was inhabited mainly by German-speaking people.
This is exactly the idea that inspired a key player in the Ukraine war, Russian citizen Igor Girkin, aka Igor Strelkov. Strelkov said in in an interview published by Russia’s Zavtra newspaper, ‘I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war,’ claiming, ‘If our unit hadn’t crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out’ (Dolgov 2014). In Lucian Kim’s words (2014), ‘Zavtra is the ideological home for ultranationalists who miss Russia as a great power, whether it was called the Russian Empire or Soviet Union.’ As Kim notes, another contributor to the publication was Alexander Borodai, a Russian citizen who served as the Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which declared its independence from Ukraine in 2014. Strelkov, who was later removed from his post (possibly because he revealed facts about the heavy involvement of Russian military forces in Ukraine, which the Kremlin wanted to keep under wraps), was openly admired by his Zavtra interviewer, editor Alexander Prokhanov (Kim 2014). Extreme right-wing elements like Strelkov and Prokhanov have flourished in Vladimir Putin’s Russia; as Jean Batou said of the Russian state (2015), ‘Embracing an ultra-nationalist ideology that gives a good deal of space to racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, its authoritarian neoconservatism has become a veritable standard for the European extreme right.’
As for Russia’s ‘legitimate’ claim to the Crimean naval base, this is founded on a 1997 treaty between Ukraine and Russia in which Ukraine agreed to lease major parts of its facilities in Crimea to the Russian Black Sea Fleet until 2017. In 2010, under pressure from Russia, pro-Russian president Yanukovych extended the lease to 2042, with an option for an additional five years. In other words, the base is on Ukrainian territory leased to Russia, just as Guantanamo Bay is on Cuban territory leased to the US by the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903. If Pilger thinks that Crimea is part of Russia because it has a Russian naval base on its territory, does he also think Guantanamo is part of the US because it has a US naval base on its territory? In fact, the naval bases at Sevastopol were not solely Russian; there was also a Ukrainian naval base, and far from the US seizing the Russian base, it was the Russians who seized two Ukrainian naval bases, including the one at Sevastopol (Vasovic and Kiselyova 2014).
Pilger implies that Crimea has always been part of Russia when he says that in Crimea ‘The Russians defended themselves’. This is simply not true. Crimean Tatars were the most numerous indigenous ethnic group in Crimea when it was annexed by the Russian empire in 1783 during the reign of Catherine the Great, who proceeded to settle it with Russian colonisers. Under Lenin, the Crimean Tatars gained special status, but were deported en masse by Stalin in 1944, a crime against humanity in which almost half of the population perished. Some returned when Crimea was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Krushchev, and others returned in large numbers from the late 1980s onward under Gorbachev (International Committee for Crimea n.d.; Uehling n.d.). They enjoyed considerable autonomy after Ukraine became independent, and were understandably upset to find their homeland forcibly re-annexed by Russia in 2014. Tatar leader Refat Chubarov condemned the ‘so-called referendum’ conducted to justify Russian annexation of Crimea as ‘illegal,’ pointing out that ‘It is being carried out even as foreign troops have occupied the whole of Crimea’ (DW 2014). The executive arm of the Congress of the Crimean Tatar People, the Mejlis, called for a boycott of the referendum, and legendary leader of the Crimean Tatars Mustafa Dzemilev confirmed that ninety-nine per cent of his people heeded the call, while only 30–50 per cent of Crimean inhabitants turned out to vote at all (Ryzhkov 2014).
In a passionate condemnation of Russian policy, Russian historian and opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov (2014) protested against the banning of the Tatar remembrance of the seventieth anniversary of their deportation, which ‘remains the most terrible tragedy in their history’, as well as the searching of mosques, schools, firms and private homes by the security forces, the barring of Dzemilev and Chubarov from entering their homeland, and the grim accounts of abductions, torture, killings and enforced disappearances of Crimean Tatar activists. Given that Pilger has stood up for the rights of the aboriginal people of Australia, he might have been expected to share Ryzhkov’s sympathy for the Crimean Tatars, but in this case his sympathies are all with the colonial settlers.
There are many others who, like Pilger, support Russian imperialism in Ukraine, including Michel Chossudovsky (2014), editor of Global Research, and ‘investigative historian’ Eric Zuesse (2015). I shall refer to these supporters of Assad and Putin as ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’. The spurious character of their anti-imperialism is demonstrated not just by their support for Russian imperialism, but also by their kid-glove treatment of Donald Trump, despite his repeated threats to ‘take’ Iraqi oil (Borger 2016).
*
At this point, a disclosure is in order: I have been an anti-imperialist for as long as I can remember. Although born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) a short while after it gained independence, and therefore never living directly under colonial rule, I grew up with parents who consistently opposed imperialism in every part of the world. However, for my parents, anti-imperialism was only part of a more general support for democracy and human rights. Although it was many years before my mother would call herself a feminist, she was a fierce advocate of equality between women and men, and inculcated this belief in the numerous generations of girls whom she taught, as well as her own children. My father, whose own mother had left her husband because he tried to stop her working as a nurse, supported her fully. Both of them were socialists, supporting workers’ rights and a welfare state, but were never Stalinists.[v] Their brand of anti-imperialism led them to oppose decolonisation measures that were combined with the oppression of minorities, such as the replacement of English with ‘Sinhala Only’ rather than Sinhala and Tamil, or the nationalisation of foreign-owned plantations accompanied by physical assaults, eviction and starvation of Tamil plantation workers. They condemned the anti-Tamil pogroms and authoritarian transformation of the state under President J.R. Jayawardene; later, when the Tamil nationalism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) resulted in terrorist attacks and the ethnic cleansing of Sinhalese and Muslims from the areas it controlled, they opposed it too.
After leaving home, I became more clearly self-identified as a Marxist and later a feminist. Although I disagreed with some of my parents’ positions – for example, I became more critical of Maoist China – I saw no reason to reject their anti-imperialism. And so I was a regular participant in demonstrations and meetings supporting the Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism, the Palestinian struggle against Israel, the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, the Prague Spring, and so on. After moving to India, I was active on issues of women’s rights, labour rights and minority rights in both India and Sri Lanka, while continuing to write and demonstrate against the US wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and Israeli oppression and massacres in Palestine. Our group also organised a meeting for Polish activists from Solidarnosc to address Left and trade union activists in the early 1980s.
It is because of this background that I am so appalled at what is happening. How has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism come to be used in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world? And what can we do about it?
*
Pseudo-anti-imperialists can be divided into roughly three categories. The first category includes people like Milne, Mustafa and Cooke, who have taken progressive positions on domestic politics in Britain, India and the United States respectively, while Brad Hoff, after having been a US Marine during the invasion of Iraq, subsequently made a commendable effort to understand the people of the region by spending time in Syria. Such commentators, however, seem unable to deal with complexity, including the possibility that there may be more than one oppressor in a particular situation; for them, ‘the West’ has to be the only oppressor in all situations. Unfortunately for them, ISIS has made no secret of its fascistic and genocidal policies, making it impossible for them to characterise it as a progressive force opposed to the West. How do they deal with this dilemma? They swallow propaganda alleging that Obama sponsors ISIS, despite the absence of any evidence to support it. The possibility that there may be many oppressors of the Syrian people, including Assad, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and Russia, is beyond their comprehension – as is the idea that it is not the West that wants the removal of Assad but the Syrian people themselves (see Chapter 7). So, again, they swallow Russian and Syrian state propaganda alleging that all those opposing Assad are terrorists. Having decided a priori that all oppression in the world is the result of Western imperialism, they ‘spin’ carefully selected information to bolster this view and leave out the reams of information contradicting it, not unlike the way mainstream Western media converted non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into a ‘fact’ leading to a catastrophic war.
Some members of this category are not so ignorant or naïve as to believe that Assad is innocent of atrocities, but when confronted about their scandalous lack of solidarity with besieged Syrians, concede (as did John Rees of the British Socialist Workers Party [SWP] and Stop the War Coalition [StWC]) they feel that their only task is to oppose the West (NotGeorgeSabra 2015). The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) of the International Committee of the Fourth International goes further in its support of Assad. When on May 1, 2013 over two hundred intellectuals, academics, artists and activists from more than thirty countries issued a statement beginning ‘We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with the millions of Syrians who have been struggling for dignity and freedom since March 2011. We call on the people of the world to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the Syrian people’ (Socialist Worker 2013), the WSWS responded by alleging that ‘The thoroughly reactionary and politically sinister character of this document is virtually self-evident’, since there are no Syrians struggling against Assad for freedom and dignity, only Islamist extremists and imperialists (North and Lantier 2013). They cover up Assad’s slaughter of the democratic opposition and their families and communities by repeating his propaganda that these people – including their fellow-Trotskyists in the Leon Sedov Brigade who fought against Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria (Roche 2017) – never existed, and, thereby, collude in the massacres.
This category suffers from a West-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too, and can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression; an Orientalism which refuses to acknowledge that Third World peoples can desire and fight for democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted in the West; and a complete lack of solidarity with people who do undertake such struggles. A good illustration of this is Brad Hoff’s article, ‘A Marine in Syria’. Towards the end of a long, idyllic description of life in Syria prior to the uprising, he casually mentions that ‘political dissent was not tolerated’, that there were ‘limitations on personal political freedoms’, and that government policy was ‘backed by an authoritarian police state’; but, he felt, this seemed ‘a sensibly practical, even if unjust, solution’ (Hoff 2015). Clearly ‘they’ (Syrians) are different from ‘us’ (Americans): ‘they’ can make do with an authoritarian police state which denies them freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, while ‘we’, of course, would never accept such a condition of unfreedom – and perish the thought that ‘they’ might ever rise up against that police state!
The second category consists of neo-Stalinists. (I call them ‘neo-Stalinists’ because although they are apologists for Russian imperialism, most of them no longer pretend to be Marxists.) As Syrian Marxist Al-Azm (2013) explains, after the Cold War the left split into a large bloc that pursued human rights, equality before the law, and democratic rights and freedoms in general, while a smaller bloc hardened its dogmatic, sectarian positions. The latter refuse to recognise the numerous instances where tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and, since the demise of the latter, Russia, has invaded, looted, dominated, exploited and annexed weaker countries while propping up allies who are every bit as brutal as the dictators propped up by the US. Many Maoists think along the same lines, and the Chinese political leadership upholds a notion of sovereignty according to which the state has the right to slaughter its own people without being held accountable by anyone in other parts of the world. These pseudo-anti-imperialists will support any regime that is supported by Russia, no matter how right-wing it may be – just like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose affinity to Putin led him to help Trump win the US presidency and continue to support him thereafter (Beauchamp 2017; Boot 2017; Ioffe 2017). The neo-Stalinists influence many people in category one who may not be Stalinists and may even call themselves Trotskyists, like the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Finally, the third category consists of tyrants and imperialists, perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression, who, as soon as they face a hint of criticism from the West, immediately claim that they are being criticised because they are anti-imperialists. While the most cursory examination of their history would prove this claim to be unfounded, members of categories one and two often accept these claims because they conform with their own preconceptions. This is especially dangerous in cases where the despots have well-funded and fairly sophisticated state media through which they disseminate a mixture of genuine news and propaganda (like the Russian RT and the Iranian Press TV), as well as paid and unpaid ideologues who do the same.
I have seen how this worked in the case of Sri Lanka. After the bloody finale of the civil war in 2009, the ruling Rajapaksa regime claimed to be anti-imperialist when EU nations, Canada and several others in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) asked for an independent investigation into and accountability for the huge civilian death toll, as well as unhindered access of humanitarian agencies to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) detained in military camps (Human Rights Council 2009a). Instead, with strong support from Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and other countries including Russia and China, a resolution was passed commending the government for addressing the needs of the IDPs and welcoming ‘the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights’ (Human Rights Council 2009b). Hugo Chavez was reported to be similarly congratulatory. In 2014, by which time the regime’s continued military occupation of Tamil-majority areas in the North and East, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, murderous assaults on critics, and scandalous corruption should have been abundantly clear, Evo Morales of Bolivia conferred a Peace and Democracy award on Mahinda Rajapaksa (Dalima 2014).
There seem to be two articles of faith underlying pseudo-anti-imperialism. (1) The ‘West’ is always my enemy and I will always oppose it, no matter what it happens to be doing at the time; and (2) The enemies of my enemy are always my friends and I will always support them, regardless of what they are doing at the time.
It is legitimate to question the motives of Western governments or their double standards when they support human rights and democracy in certain instances and not others, but what justification is there for opposing them when they ask for accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and supporting regimes that have been looting, torturing, raping and killing their own citizens? That is exactly what these ‘anti-imperialist’ icons of twenty-first-century socialism were doing in the case of Sri Lanka. There was no question of sanctions against Sri Lanka, much less military action; all that was being debated were the UNHRC resolutions that might have embarrassed the regime in power and helped opponents to replace it with one which had more respect for human rights and democracy. While that did not materialise in 2009, it did in subsequent years. When Sri Lankans did eventually manage to bring about regime change in 2015, it was no thanks to the pseudo-anti-imperialists.
I have concentrated on the way in which the claim of being ‘anti-imperialist’ has been used to provide implicit or explicit support to far-right regimes. But this blinkered view of the world also infects antiwar movements, leading them to take positions that prolong wars and enable despots to carry out massacres. This book is thus an appeal to anti-imperialists to oppose all oppression by one country of another; to antiwar activists to understand that by opposing the right to self-defence and defence of one’s community one becomes complicit in bloodbaths; to socialists to understand that socialist internationalism demands solidarity with democratic revolutions, not with the counterrevolutions trying to crush them; and to humanitarians to support the right of people in all countries to demand democratic rights and freedoms without being subjected to arbitrary arrest and incarceration, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings. The book will have eight chapters, divided into three parts:
Part I: Understanding Imperialism
Chapter 1: The Politics of Anti-Imperialism. The first chapter will lay out the theoretical argument underpinning my case studies of situations in which right-wing positions have been taken by self-professed liberals and socialists. Marxist and left-liberal theories of imperialism (including those of Marx, Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Bauer) saw the division of the world by imperialist powers as a way in which capitalism was forcibly spread to all parts of the globe. Lenin’s analysis, in particular, has gained wide acceptance. Today it is clear that it conflates two distinct phases of capitalism, but at least it embodies a clear progressive politics of support for the oppressed classes and for democracy in all countries. This position was debased beyond recognition when Stalin came to power and, in the name of building ‘socialism in one country,’ reconstituted Russian imperialism, leading to inter-imperialist rivalry with the US in the Cold War. Once a global capitalist world economy had materialised, US imperialism degenerated into neoconservatism, a doctrine supporting global military dominance. In tandem, pseudo-anti-imperialism developed: a mindless opposition to ‘the West’, and, in some cases, an equally mindless support for Russian neoconservatism. By opposing democratic revolutions, neo-Stalinists sabotage struggles against neoliberalism and capitalism.
The purpose of Part I will be to outline an alternative narrative on imperialism and global capitalism to that of the pseudo-anti-imperialists.
Part II: Case Studies
Chapter 2: Russia and Ukraine. This chapter traces how Stalin replaced Lenin’s anti-imperialism with Russian imperialism. This policy was abandoned under Gorbachev but revived by Putin, who also pushed the state far to the right. Pseudo-anti-imperialists justified the annexation of Crimea and the intervention of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine by repeating Russian propaganda that the Euro-Maidan movement was a fascist one, that Crimea was always part of Russia, and that there were no Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine. All these claims, however, have been disproved. While right-wing Ukrainian nationalists have certainly been involved in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, so have right-wing Great-Russian nationalists; and unlike the defence forces of Ukraine, which are politically diverse, the separatist fighters in Ukraine are uniformly right-wing. The position of the pseudo-anti-imperialists in fact supports Russian imperialism, while denying solidarity to both Russians and Ukrainians attempting to carry out democratic revolutions in their countries and to end the war.
Chapter 3: Bosnia and Kosovo. Tito’s authoritarian response to a nascent democratic revolution in the early 1970s facilitated the growth of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was triggered by Slobodan Milošević’s drive to build a Greater Serbia, starting in Kosovo. When Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, it was surrounded and invaded by the Serb army and militias as well as Croatian militias. What followed was the systematic destruction of the Muslim heritage of Bosnia, ethnic cleansing and genocide in which the UN and NATO were shamefully complicit. NATO intervened with airstrikes only after images of death camps in which Bosnians were starved and tortured emerged, and the Srebrenica massacre took place under the noses of the UN forces that were supposed to protect the victims. Pseudo-anti-imperialists like Michel Chossudovsky, James Petras and Edward S. Herman covered up the mass rape, torture and murder carried out by the Serb nationalists; they attacked the US and NATO not for failing to protect Bosnian Muslims, but for halting the genocide.
Chapter 4: Iran. Saudi Arabia is rightly denounced by anti-imperialists for the reactionary policies of its regime and the consequences this has both at home and abroad, yet the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is supported by pseudo-anti-imperialists. This support goes well beyond objections to threats of military attacks on Iran or sanctions which hurt ordinary citizens, which should certainly be condemned. In many cases it extends to support for everything the regime does, including its sectarian, expansionist interventions in Iraq and Syria. The rationale for these double standards is simple: the Saudis are seen as allies of the US, while Iran is opposed to the US; therefore, supporting the Iranian regime constitutes ‘anti-imperialism’. But is this an adequate argument for ditching the struggles of Iranians against Iranian imperialism and for their own democratic revolution, including women’s liberation, trade union rights, the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, and freedom of expression? Should we ignore the contribution of the Islamic Republic’s leadership to the carnage in Syria and Iraq simply because they organise demonstrations chanting ‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’?
Chapter 5: Iraq. It is undeniable that the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq is responsible for much of the chaos and slaughter that followed, but events that preceded it (a brutal dictatorship, the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 invasion of Kuwait followed by the US bombing of Iraq, sanctions) are also implicated. So are subsequent events, such as the destruction of Saddam’s Baath regime, which allowed a Shia Islamist regime controlled by Iran to entrench itself and at the same time allowed Al Qaeda into Iraq. The lethal combination of Iraqi ex-Baathists and Al Qaeda Islamists (which later mutated into ISIS) began during this period. The IRI and Iraqi government sponsored Shia militias that carried out atrocities against Sunni civilians, making ISIS appear to some, at least temporarily, as the lesser evil. Pseudo-anti-imperialists who blame everything on Western intervention fail to recognise local and regional factors contributing to the crisis in Iraq, including Iranian imperialism. Iraq also raises the question: should ‘humanitarian’ Western military interventions always be opposed? An examination of this question in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2014 intervention against the ISIS genocide of Yazidis leads to the conclusion that support or opposition depends not on subjective motives but on the objective circumstances and outcome of the intervention.
Chapter 6: The Assad Regime. This chapter looks at the background to the Syrian conflict, including early democracy movements, Hafez al-Assad’s authoritarian regime, his sabotage of the Palestinian struggle, and the transition to his son Bashar. It also examines Bashar al-Assad’s role in sponsoring Islamists during the Iraq war, thus fostering the rise of ISIS. The Assad regime was supported by pseudo-anti-imperialists because of its links with Russia.
Chapter 7: The Syrian Uprising. This chapter looks at the 2011 uprising and the militarisation of the democratic opposition in response to the brutal repression carried out by the state. Assad, like Gaddafi, is credited with being a secular ruler and therefore a bulwark against the rise of extremist Islamist forces like ISIS, but in reality, he has fostered sectarianism and has had a symbiotic relationship with ISIS. The vicious intervention of the Iranian state, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias and the Russian military to crush the democratic uprising and slaughter civilians is examined. Syria typifies the moral and political degeneration of pseudo-anti-imperialists who support, or fail to oppose, the brutal crushing of a democratic revolution by a totalitarian state and foreign powers.
In each of these cases, there will be a brief overview of the background to the conflict and the conflict itself, followed by an examination of contemporary sources showing how pseudo-anti-imperialists systematically take right-wing, counterrevolutionary positions.
The aim in Part II is to challenge both factually and morally the accounts of pseudo-anti-imperialists who support authoritarianism and imperialism, and suggest alternative narratives in each case, providing enough detail to enable genuine anti-imperialists, antiwar activists, socialists and humanitarians from other countries to identify the people with whom they should be expressing solidarity. Given that I have not lived in these countries, nor do I know their languages, this section has relied on the accounts of others that are either written in or translated into English. My experience of struggles for democracy in Sri Lanka and India nevertheless provides important insights. For example, the civil war in Sri Lanka demonstrates clearly that so far as democracy activists are concerned, the enemy of my enemy can be equally my enemy, and that totalitarian forces engaged in a fight to the death against each other can be united in their hostility to human rights defenders. India demonstrates the terrifying speed with which religious bigotry can be transformed into gruesome violence, as well as the right-wing obsession with rewriting history. Both countries illustrate how the ‘war against terror’ has been used to target entire communities, and both exemplify the complex ways in which struggles for women’s rights, workers’ rights, minority rights and other democratic rights and freedoms intersect and interact with one another. Furthermore, these case studies fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle – a fact that confirms the validity of each.
Part III: Looking for Alternatives
Chapter 8: What can we do? With anti-imperialists and the left divided and confused about the struggle against non-Western imperialisms and the brutal authoritarian regimes they support, Chapter 8 identifies some of the ways in which we can fight back: by pursuing and propagating the truth; by reaffirming the moral value of opposing oppression and proclaiming solidarity with the victims of violence; by making a critique of ideologies, especially on the left, that devalue democracy and thereby promote authoritarianism; by reasserting the importance of internationalism; and, finally, by examining the concept of national sovereignty, as well as international humanitarian, human rights and criminal law and the institutions created to implement these, and proposing reforms that would better promote democracy and help to end mass slaughter.
The purpose of this book is to examine some examples of the betrayal of all that anti-imperialism should stand for, and to identify the people in each country with whom we should be expressing solidarity. The very least we can do is to listen to their voices of courage, wisdom and humanity, and amplify them in whatever way we can.
(This is my Introduction to Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2018, pp.1-19.)
Notes
[i] For which ‘Daesh’ is the Arabic acronym. Al-Sham or Greater Syria, along with Iraq, is believed by ISIS to be the heart of their caliphate.
[ii] I am a proponent of non-violent struggle, have never participated in anything else, and believe that in most circumstances it is more effective and more conducive to democracy in the long term. However, I do recognise that there are situations in which non-violent resistance cannot succeed against overwhelming violent oppression. In such circumstances, I believe that armed opposition is better than allowing violent oppression to continue without effective resistance.
[iii] Articles supporting Assad and his Hezbollah, Iranian, Iraqi Shia and Russian allies are ubiquitous, and it would be both tedious and nauseating to quote them all. What is disturbing is that sites like Counterpunch publish articles supporting the Russian bombing of Syria and spouting rhetoric about ‘bombing the hell out of the jihadis’ and ‘killing these jokers until every last one of them is dead’ (Whitney 2015), regardless of the fact that hospitals are being bombed and helpless civilians including children are being killed (Al Jazeera 2015b).
[iv] Lemkin was a Polish Jew, most of whose relatives were wiped out by the Nazis.
[v] Ceylon was an unusual case where Trotskyists outnumbered Stalinists in the Lanka Sama Samaj Party (LSSP) and expelled the latter rather than the other way around (see Hensman 2009, which also gives an account of the degeneration of the left). My parents were never members of any party, but had friends and acquaintances in the LSSP. This could partly explain why I grew up with books by Trotsky on the bookshelves and took it for granted that the Moscow trials and crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 were evidence of condemnable totalitarianism, rather than anything to do with socialism.