Look back, look around - and get going
Tony Hall, in this posting of early 2006, goes into a rave of global proportions, looks modern history in the eye, and asks: doesn't it all add up to a multitude of models, a huge variety of lessons, a rich tapestry of possibilities for a broad consensus of the left?
Dear debaters… I am so exercised with the enormity of present events and the fallout ahead, that like many of us, I am spreading out into a rave of global proportions. In my case, it's about revisiting almost at random, moments in the history of modern times, not afraid of the contradictions, but really to call up the positive, and to build a broader consensus than ever. I hope some will want to follow and stay the winding course of my meander, picking up or knocking down points and pointers as they go along.
Most of all, I hope that people will read this roundup, and other blog essays before it, and postings to follow, as my archive of actuality, my rhetoric of reality. As a journalist who has lived, worked and wandered for almost fifty years in Africa, UK, India and the Middle East, visited East Asia and the Americas, closely observed the imperialist game everywhere, I know whereof I speak, and I know when others likewise get at the truth.
I like political debate as much as anybody does, but stirring it is not my main aim here. I am passing on information and the lessons of experience, direct and indirect. Mine is a one-way blog. My mantra will be what my son Philip suggested: Ipse dixit.
SOME PEOPLE make strong and important points about new frontiers and new strategies, as they run through the imperial performance of the last decade or so. Some make the usual conflations which may end up deepening fault-lines in the so vitally necessary understanding between the left and left-liberals towards a common front.
An internationally esteemed left-winger, an icon, performed an odious comparison: that the US bombing raid on a Sudan medical drugs factory killed more people than the Twin Towers outrage. Ouch… One debater conflates/equates the US forces landings in Somalia at the height of the internal chaos there, with US counter invasion of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.
It's not at all obvious, in either the Iraq 91 or the Somalia cases, that the immediate motive behind these was to extend control to secure resources and markets for imperialism. Some power with the capacity had to go in and drive the Iraqis, quickly and firmly, out of Kuwait. The UN is of course not geared for this, and could only accept the need for such an action: Saddam's unprovoked invasion, a huge destabiliser in itself, was the last straw in his decades of blatant and vicious aggression against his own people and his neighbours. In this he was supported or blind-eyed at times by the US and the West, at other times by the SU and its allies, usually for the basest of reasons in each case.
The problem lay in not following through, not supporting the indigenous uprising in southern Iraq, and the opposition among Kurds in the north, to overthrow the Takriti mafia – while returning Iraq to its nationhood through a democracy for all its peoples. That would have been a project to be tackled only under UN auspices. (Of course US imperialism wasn't there to support popular uprisings and plans to promote democracy, any more than it does in Afghanistan, or in Iraq today, but that's a different question).
Now Somalia: The US troops' Mogadishu beach-landing was a PR comedy of Forrest Gump proportions, ending in tragic PR disaster – but it was again, more an effort, initially, at peacekeeping than imperial aggression. The capital of Somalia had totally imploded, and had been in complete anarchy for many months. So again, in the absence of an effective UN army which the post cold-war world so badly needs – not one more blue-beret detachment to monitor buffer zones – some force would sooner or later go in and try to restore basic order.
Remember, the implosion of Mogadishu was in no way the immediate or even medium term fault of any outside power. It happened like this: sub clans of the Hawiye – the main original clan of the city and surrounding countryside – having driven out president Siad Barre and his Marehan clan and their allies, in weeks of brave house-to-house and street battles, after years of increasing oppression – started to turn their RPGs and their AK47s against each other as soon as Siad Barre had disappeared over the horizon!
This was because Mohamed Farah Aideed of the Habr Gidr clan of the Hawiye clan family, came into the city and clashed over leadership with Ali Mahdi Mohamed of the Abgaal clan of the Hawiye family, who had led much of the city resistance and overthrow of Siad.
So it came about, in the following months, that Hawiye Habr Gidr pummelled and killed Hawiye Abgaal. Abgaal Hawiye fought Habr Gidr Hawiye, until they had reduced much of the capital they had triumphantly and bravely taken, to rubble. The two main rivals, both Hawiye, now dominated different ruined quarters of Mogadishu. The streets and surrounding countryside moved into some kind of Mad Max scenario. And areas of famine bloomed.
It was into this mess that the US force landed. The problem, as in Iraq, lay in what they didn't do (or were congenitally incapable of even conceiving). They failed above all to work sensitively alongside one of the most hopeful UN initiatives for peace ever, which was embarked on under UN special representative Mohamed Sahnoun, a former Algerian diplomat and OAU senior official, and a man greatly respected by our liberation movements over the struggle years.
Sahnoun was in the middle of sensitive negotiations with clan elders, as a way of bringing the warlords to the peace table, when he was swept aside by UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali, at the behest of the Americans. The US government didn't have a clue how to deal with the situation, and didn't give a bugger, any more than they did in Iraq or in Viet Nam – or do now. Of course the US government usually ends up promoting the interests of the worst elements – that's what it is usually geared to do. But it was the Somalis, having been messed up in the early 1970s by US imperialism interfering with the possibility of a socialist alliance between Somalia, Ethiopia and South Yemen, who now, 20 years later, shot themselves in the foot. Only then came pax Americana – or rather, snafu Americana.
Coming to the present, the problem is that the US government in the last presidential election was hijacked by the worst of the worst elements, far too easily, and now they are blatantly, manically, taking the country down the tubes with them, from Kyoto, through Enron, to tax breaks for the rich, and now UN-defying war. It wasn't always so, at all times...
I'll dive in and brave charges of naivety and muddled thinking and wild generalisations, to say the following: After the US under FD Roosevelt was forced to respond to excessive capitalism and the 'threat' of socialism, with New Deal reforms, it then joined in and helped to win the Good War, against Fascism. Its post-war policies continued (almost despite the machine) with a sufficiently progressive momentum to push a range of positive reforms in Europe and Japan – deeply anti-communist of course, but broadly Keynesian and not anti-labour in their thrust: the Bretton Woods agreement, the founding of the UN, the Marshall Plan...
It is not just bizarre, there's a lesson there somewhere, to contemplate how a deeply reactionary military dictator like General MacArthur ordered that Japan have proper trade unions, even as the US corporate giants helped retool Japan’s industry. That was pax Americana if you like;
Later, Republican President Eisenhower, formerly Allied Supreme Commander and used to ordering the world about in a good cause, was willing and able to kick the Israelis out of Egypt in 1956, just like that, even as the British and French governments were also busy raping the Middle East. That too, was a kind of pax Americana we can only wistfully dream about today.
Eisenhower it was who coined the phrase, and warned, post-war, about the coming dominance of the Military Industrial Complex; and as Gore Vidal reminds us, it was a Democratic President, Truman, who cranked up the Cold War at the urging of that Military Industrial Complex. The Iron Curtain was concocted by Churchill and made by US Steel. It was the demented leader of the poor zombied ruling group in Moscow who helped put it up.
One could make the case – Oliver Stone more or less has – that John Kennedy, and later his brother, were assassinated because they had begun to act as if they believed they were actually voted in to run the US government, not necessarily all the time in the interests of big business and mafia. One could say Jimmy Carter was, is, remarkably good and honest, as politicians go – thus the image of miserable failure which the media visited upon him. (His worst characteristic – giving in to the hawks around him, like Brzezinski – was not a weakness in the eyes of the media.)
One could say that Clinton was one of the most able, successful presidents the US ever had, not only in image, originally, but in managing the economy, and in other ways, and with quite well-intentioned policies, until he discovered – as in his famous expostulation at a White House NSC meeting: You mean that everything I do is at the mercy of a bunch of f***ing bond traders?! At which point he started to Get Real, as the hateful phrase goes. So of course, a man like that had to have his personal reputation trashed by digging out sexual doings of which many if not most men in power are guilty, and harping on them until even the most gossip hungry media junkie was gagging and said, enough!
The ultimate corruption, commoditisation of the proud tradition of investigative journalism.
Now the remaining superpower has put the world in deep crisis. What the other superpower – growing global awareness, as one American recently described it – has to do is to come together behind a realistic agenda, building on the best of the possible, learning from the past. It is time to wake up to the many ways we are being diverted from this.
One of the first things to do is put identity politics and all its various categories: religious politics, gender politics, sexual politics, race politics, age militancy, youth militancy, cultural mystifications and all the rest, valid or otherwise, on the sidelines where they belong, and start devoting our attention again to the traditions and principles of humanist, rational, tolerant secular politics.
But on the way there we must recognise the powerful role of the modern feminist movement in advancing Western culture, taking societies towards gender equity in many countries, not least in the United States; the tigers – from the literary power of Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, the literary revisions of Kate Millett, the rambunctious platform rhetoric of Bella Abzug, the quiet power of Sheila Rowbotham to the left identity of Ruth First.
Nor can we ever set aside the most effective contributor to advancing women’s rights and greater freedom in the post-colonial third world: the influence of the Soviet Union.
Somalia is one minor example of steps towards liberating a schoolgirl generation in the 1970s. The historic case is that of Afghanistan from the late 1970s, where a Marxist government, allied to but independent of the Soviet Union, brought women their greatest freedom for a few years, until US-supported Islamic extremism returned them to slavery.
Until all feminists go into therapy to face the fundamental historical truth of that era, they will never be able effectively to address the central challenge of our age: the empowerment of women, particularly in the third world, through resolute secular state action.
And this brings us to the heroic role of two women of third world origins, risking their lives in recent years, to speak out strongly against the Islamic oppression of women – and to demand state censure of those who practice it in any form. They are the Dutch Somali MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the Bengali physician, writer and poet Taslima Nasrin, who is a secular humanist.
The lives of both are in constant danger. And Hirsi Ali has even been prepared to lose her left-liberal political identity, in the eyes of the confused left-liberal party which – out of misplaced post-colonial guilt perhaps – is prepared to despoil one of Europe’s most advanced humanistic societies, by tolerating the intolerable – oppression of women and girls, in the name of “community rights.”
The role of that Kabul government, the widely supported PDPA under Taraki in widespread reforms, including in feudal land ownership and servitude of women, will go down as a glorious moment in history – which it took the US-supported Osama bin Ladens to lay waste.
Before demoting race as a central issue in our politics, we must pay tribute also to the long and continuing tradition of fine and brave leadership among modern black Americans, from the luminary Paul Robeson, to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – both assassinated – the fire of Angela Davis, the quiet example of Rosa Parks, the brave black power fists that shot up at the Olympic Games, the Stokeleys, the Cleavers and other Panthers, to Andrew Young – remember how Jimmy Carter was forced to fire him as his UN Ambassador because he was “exposed” as receiving Yasser Arafat in his New York office? (and now we have Bolton). To the epic continuing presence of Jesse Jackson – who should have been US President long ago.
Instead of which, we are faced with the farce of a Condi Rice candidature – because she is black, and a woman. That’s how far identity politics can drag you down, as it took down the British state, crippled by a gender-exploiting Margaret Thatcher.
But shrugging off the demands of identity politics, seeing through its diversionary damage and getting back to the mainstream socialist project, does not mean falling out with each other constantly over the meaning of Marx, the laws of Lenin, the tactics of Trotsky. All were among the greatest of political philosophers, but when they were political activists, they wrote pamphlets and instruction manuals for the time, not ideological verities in stone.
What I have dropped into the pool of debate here, hoping to make ripples, not least among people much better schooled than I, are a few unrefined and random but lumps of genuine history. There are so many more as well... And it is on all these that we must build the blocks of our post-Bush future; we must build on the common positive ground.
Not only must Democrats start to take their agenda seriously again, even Republicans can start looking for their lost ideals.
As for the Brits, well, if they don't hurry up and jump on the Eurotrain, they will miss – or mess – the one sensible socio-political arrangement that has been forged by a bunch of wealthy nations. The EU has a quite awesome record over recent years of strengthening the economies and quality of life in several formerly poorer countries on the margins of Western Europe, and hanging on to protection for working people, and functioning public sectors. (In a kind of historical irony, to the joy of anti-Euro imperialists, those very gains and strengths in Western Europe may be diluted, and warped, by the forced pace of bringing into the EU, the reactionary former satellite countries of Eastern Europe.)
We should doff our caps in passing to the small northern European countries, notably in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, who have always been willing to share a focused portion of their wealth in funding and human resources to help the underdeveloped, economically and politically (and incidentally, to Sweden’s Olof Palme, a martyr of that dedication).
In another part of the world we can look past the awful Howard, and maybe learn from a great past moment: Gough Whitlam's Australia, not only his vigorous political initiatives, but in the arts, the way generous and sensitive government funding brought on the lovely flowering of Australian cinema. And we must all re-read how Whitlam was blatantly brought down, in the mid-70s, when he started making noises about delinking Australian from US intelligence. And at present in the neighbouring country where good films (and good wine) are also made, New Zealand, we must watch and hope that Helen Clark, in seizing the political moment, can sustain the genuine social democracy she set out to build.
Of course the great giant of anti-imperialist solidarity and striving for socialism, however travestied, was the Soviet Union, with its allies. We can consider whether the biggest single contribution to the global disorder we now face was not the tipping over of Gorbachev's great reform movement into the dismantling of the Soviet Union, directly followed by civil wars – Abkhazia, Chechnya... massive economic breakdown – and the turning of oil-bearing former Soviet republics into playing fields for western oil giants, a la Middle East. It is only the leadership of Putin that may bring Russia back from the brink.
And above all, we who live in and care about the Third World, we must revisit and revalidate our own post-war history, close ranks in paying tribute to the struggles and strengths of, and learning from the weaknesses of: Tito's Yugoslavia, Soekarno's Indonesia, Nehru's India, Nasser's Egypt, Lumumba's Congo, Nkrumah's Ghana, Allende's Chile, the Sandinistas' Nicaragua, Frelimo's Mozambique, MPLA's Angola... and trace just how imperialism sooner or later, directly or indirectly, bloodily crushed, dismantled or disabled the dedication and the promise of every one.
We must celebrate those and other really great contributions, sacrifices and victories: the truly epic support of Nyerere's Tanzania, in playing host for years to the liberation movements against minority rule in Southern Africa, and in overthrowing Idi Amin.
It's time to write in letters of gold the victory of the Angolans and Cubans, with the ANC, in the Battle of Cuito Canavale, which finally sealed the fate of White minority rule, by proving that apartheid power could never win a set-piece battle.
And to celebrate with music and song the happy, lovely survival through all these decades of revolutionary Cuba itself, as a socialist state, a country almost completely deprived of material wealth, yet with literacy and life expectancy rates to compare with those of Canada and northern Europe; a country whose social, political and cultural environment should be revered, protected and studied as a World Heritage.
We should look at and consider those past fleeting political moments of promise, as in Murtala Mohamed's Nigeria and Thomas Sankara's Burkina Faso (strangely, yet one more progressive moment that left a legacy of good film being celebrated); and pay tribute to the great dream and future reality of Arafat’s Palestine, or still better, Palestine Israel.
We can consider the impact of Museveni on Uganda, and on the region: a young radical who, from one of the strongest popular political bases in modern African history, wasn't afraid to introduce and manage some unlikely policies and initiatives – bringing back a feudal king, but as a figurehead, reversing the flight of capital, successfully to restore a broken-down economy and society; and to wage the earliest but most successful fight so far, against AIDS.
We must hope that Lula in Brazil and Chavez in Venezuela sustain progressive impetus in the present political moments each has seized.
We must even – hold your breath – look and learn from Mahathir Mohamed's Malaysia, one of the current success stories, not only in the long haul of its indigenising and strengthening the country's economy but in taking on and surviving, even winning out over, the globalising bullyboys. All this, as a Muslim, but keeping government secular.
Wasn't it entrancing political theatre to watch just a few years ago during the East Asian economic crisis when Mahathir stood up boldly against Western and IMF manipulations, insisting on a strong role for government in market mediation and currency control (with successful results later by the way). He was suddenly visited by one Al Gore, US vice president, who for the first time seemed angry enough in his rhetoric to appear more than a dead sheep, trying to savage Mahathir publicly, allegedly for jailing of his former number two – a radical Islamist, dead keen on the 'free market'.
Doesn't it all add up to a multitude of models, a huge variety of lessons, a rich tapestry of possibilities?
From these sources we can identify a vast spectrum of different forces for progress. We have to concentrate on these, and see past that horrible little man and his doctor-death minders.
Tony Hall
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