OffTheCuff

Stop The War Coalition

I HAVE JUST WATCHED GEORGE GALLOWAY on a video clip. He is appealing for donations in aid of the Stop the War Coalition. They need money to finance their extremely important work over the coming twelve months. Their work is stopping wars - they do what it says on the tin - or at least they try. Aided by Gorgeous George, and the irate polemics of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, Lindsey German, John Rees, and Andrew Murray, with the aid of Tony Benn, and a host of usual suspects, have worked hard at stopping wars for a number of years now. Of course, they have not had much success, but that is hardly their fault. Stopping wars is an extremely difficult thing to do. Indeed, as we all know, wars are usually won or lost, they are very rarely “stopped”.

    Given our dismal history in this regard, you might ask why is it that stopping wars is such a preoccupation of so many people on the far left. The Communist Party of Britain, the successor of the old pro-Moscow communist party, has the slogan: “For Peace and Socialism” plastered all over its publicity materials. They are carrying on a noble tradition which dates back to the Popular Front days of the 1930s when the political parties allied with Stalin’s dictatorship all promoted peace and civil liberties throughout the world. Pablo Picasso drew the famous dove of peace for them and peace councils and congresses abounded well into the 1950s; the friends of Moscow positioned themselves as the friends of mankind. “Peace” and “Socialism” were held to be inseparable goals, if not actually synonymous. This enabled them to campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament in Britain while supporting the Warsaw Pact and the USSR’s nuclear deterrent.

    Today, of course, things are radically different, but stopping wars is still a preoccupation of those in the tiny political parties and groupuscules of the far left, and the much more popular anti-war committees, coalitions, and campaigns, which they staff on behalf of a much wider public.

    Despite their genuine popularity and the good intentions of most of their supporters, the difficulty remains that these groups, just like their Stalinist forebears, only ever oppose wars sanctioned by the United States or by the large capitalist powers. They do not campaign or “mobilise” their supporters against wars in general, or even wars in particular, unless the war in question can be said to be caused, aggravated, deepened, or worsened by the United States and her allies. Consequently, the Russian state could shell and bomb its own citizens in Chechnya and literally demolish the city of Grozny, and a large number of the city’s inhabitants, without even one dove of peace taking flight from the camp of the Stop the War-ists. The same could be said of the wars in Darfur and Southern Sudan, in the Congo, in Sri Lanka, and many other places.

    It is the case that the popular peace movements of the left have always had their hands full - they can’t take up every cause. They have to prioritise; they have decided to concentrate on what they regard as the principal cause of wars in the world, the “central contradiction” you might say, and this always turns out to be something called “imperialism” which is code for American and Western commercial and military interests.

    The interests of Russia, like those of the Soviet Union before it, are not “imperialist”, nor are the interests of China in the Middle East or Africa. Neither were those fighting for greater Serbia, for a greater Sudan, nor those fighting against the Tamils for the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka; none of these forces can be characterised as “imperialist” or as “warmongers”. Only the Western democracies are “imperialist”, and it is the Western democracies which always pose the gravest threat to world peace.

    Paradoxically, you might think, the Western democracies are also the principal threat to freedom, democracy, and civil liberties, throughout the world. Any fool can see this by looking at the Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad, at the new regime in Tripoli, and the gang of shysters governing Kabul.

    There is much evidence to support this point of view, much that is truly appalling in the modern history and political and military record of the Western powers. Their democracy building exploits have not been conspicuous successes, particularly in the context of America and Nato’s armed interventions and invasions. The democracy-building rhetoric coming out of Washington is often startling in its naivety. Frankly, it is often delusional.

    On the other hand, there are now considerably more bourgeois democracies in the world than there used to be. The idea of building societies founded on the defence of private property and the rule of law, governed by politicians that enjoy popular consent, in which people are allowed to found free trade unions, speak their mind, and oppose the arbitrary actions of the powerful, has definitely taken hold. Hundreds of millions of people now live in such societies - or in societies that are making strenuous efforts to deepen democracy in places where its roots are far too shallow to be effective against the arbitrary actions of the rich and powerful. This global trend has seen communist dictatorships like Poland and anti-communist dictatorships like South Korea be transformed into democratic states - it has seen India struggling without pause against the anti-democratic forces which still make the life of its impoverished masses intolerable. Now Brazil and many other places scarred by ingrained poverty, and the rule of irresponsible elites, have joined the struggle.

    What this reveals is that the development of globalised capitalism and its related crises has rendered older conceptions of imperialism redundant and the rhetoric of the radical left radically irrelevant. Wars and rivalry between states are still with us and continue to threaten billions of people with barbarism and even nuclear devastation, but these realities are not remotely addressed by the Stop the War-ists of the left. The general political trend, if there can be said to be one, in the world today, is the trend towards the establishment of responsible government. Rulers no longer have the sovereign right to murder and brutalise their own citizens at will. There is no sovereign right to tyranny.

    Regardless of the criminal irresponsibility of George W. Bush’s White House, of the duplicity and disasters of policies framed in London or Paris, the struggle for bourgeois democracy - the defence of private property, the rule of law, free trade unions, freedom of speech, and elected governments, is what great masses of the people want from Russia to Egypt, and from China to Chile.

    So the Stop the War-ists are in some difficulty. The Stop the War Coalition in Britain was founded on 21 September 2001, just ten days after the Islamist attacks on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Its express purpose, its raison d’être, if you will, is to oppose any armed response at all to Islamism. The Stop the War-ists do not believe in fighting armed or militant Islamism under any circumstances. Their view is that Western military responses always do more harm than good.

    This puts them in some difficult situations; most recently it has found them opposing the Nato air strikes against Gaddafi’s regime, even though they knew that without them, Gaddafi would crush the popular rebellion against his rule. It means sharing political platforms with Hezbollah and other supporters of the clerical fascists in Tehran - the Stop the War-ists have no compunction when it comes to lining up with out-and-out reactionary forces, against their principal enemy, the United States and the Western democracies.

    They are even prepared to defend the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They have opposed the Arab League’s call for Assad to step down and call elections. They have been fulsome in their praise for those who want to keep Assad in power. When Russia and China vetoed the recent resolution at the UN, which called for Assad to stop the war against his own people, by resigning and calling elections, the Morning Star reported that:

“Stop the War convenor Lindsey German said Russia and China had been absolutely within their rights to veto the resolution. "The question of what goes on in Syria must be for the Syrian people," she said. "The reason the resolution was vetoed is because of the previous resolution regarding Libya which was not supposed to be about regime change but turned out to be exactly that." Every Western intervention in the Middle East has been disastrous and Syria would be no different, Ms German said.”

The bluntness of German’s rhetoric is the key here. “What goes on in Syria must be for the Syrian people”. Well, yes, but when the state has tanks and artillery, and all the opposition groups inside Syria support the calls for Assad to go without conditions, and for free elections to be convened, why can’t the Stop the War-ists support the “people of Syria” against Assad, Hezbollah, and Assad’s allies in Tehran? Why can’t the Stop the War-ists call for the war against the “Syrian people” to be stopped, why can’t they break from their friends in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing?

    The answer is, that the political groups at the back of the Stop the War-ists have a prior commitment to opposing capitalism, bourgeois democracy, and all its works. They seek to use the undoubted popularity of peace to build up loose coalitions of people amongst which they can campaign for communist politics. There is no reason at all why they shouldn’t do this - we live in a democracy after all - but it would be helpful if they were explicit about their communist agenda rather than attempting to hide under flocks of doves.

    There are, of course, much more credible peace campaigns like Hands Off the People of Iran, which is also sponsored by a little communist organisation, but at least they do not lend their support to the tyrants in Tehran and Damascus.

    The lesson of all this is that as the civil war mounts in Syria, as Tehran strives to assert its influence through its proxies in the Lebanon, and its military buildup in the region, as millions of people mount more and more strenuous attacks on the military dictatorship in Egypt, we should maintain our focus on the battle for bourgeois democracy. We should reject the distractions of the Stop the War-ists and focus instead, in the midst of instability and danger, in attempting to determine what is the best course, moment-by-moment, for the democratic forces to take. 

        © Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 154, February 6, 2012 at Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net