Does the Socialist Party support the attacks on ISIS?
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Not as bad as suggesting that there are some members who sympathise with bombing ISIS. Sometimes you go too far.
I think the problem is (and it arises all the time in all areas of our case) when we expose the hypocrisy and double standards of politicians and capitalists we get accused of supporting or providing ammunition for things we oppose."If you aren't with us, you are against us?Ours is a harder message to convey, full of nuances such as we would prefer, if forced to choose, an Assad secular dictatorship to an ISIS despotic theocracy and, like it or not, we would prefer "bourgeois democracy" of Hollande's France to Assad's Syria as it offers socialists increased opportunity to advocate socialism. It gets a bit more complicated if we are offered only the option of a future ISIS caliphate or Saudi Arabia Al Nustra dominated Syria…But truth again be told…none of us are facing these hard decisions and as far i see…people are voting with their feet…they have become refugees … and if i knew any Syrian/Iraqi socialist , i would have no hesitation in urging them to flee the war-zone, too, and forget about trying to sell the Socialist Standard on the corner of an Aleppo street…If he or she cannot flee to safety, then keep their heads down, don't put it above the parapet……we don't need socialist martyrs …live for socialism, don't die for it…The article i linked to about Hitler is important…there is no prospect of socialism in Syria/Iraq right now or in the foreseeable future, nothing to fight or die for….(i don't think we say turn the other cheek if you are personally are in danger…as an individual, you can use violence to survive if, for example, you need to escape Raqqa and being an unwilling human shield for ISIS) As our info says "Because the truth and the facts often contradict "common knowledge", socialists have to show that "common knowledge" is wrong. That takes more words than just accepting the status quo." and people hate reading long wordy discourses so react in a knee-jerk response.Our case is that the enemy of our enemy is NOT our friend…What infuriates me are the media's omissions taking place and how news is hidden from the public.A few news organisations yesterday featured had the stats that Russia has killed 200 civilians since they began their bombing of ISIS. They failed to put a figure on the so-called "coalition" deaths of civilians. But what more, they have purposefully and deliberately under-reported the Saudi bombing in Yemen's civil war, with British-bought weaponry and not one condemnation of Cameron as the main sale-person of those.
Many on the left have had sympathy for those who are fighting for their lives against ISIS; the Kurds and yazidis for example, they have led themselves to support the political and military organisations leading this resistance, most notably, the YPG/PKK ( and the YPG/PKK themselves espouse a politics inspired in part by Murray bookchin). However, the pressure of realpolitik is such that the imperial machinations cannot be blithely ignored by the participants in the conflict. Thus, the Kurdish forces, who have up to recently been receiving limited support from the US, have now been dumped in order to court continued US access to Turkish airbases. In response the Kurds have been actively courting Russian support (aided by the animosity between turkey and Russia), supporting the Russians means abandoning the Syrian opposition, who are Russia's main target in support of Assad.my friends who have been vocal supporters of the Kurdish resistance and Rojiva experiment, are now in the difficult position of finding that many of the Kurds who they have been supporting are now posting uncritical support for Putin and Assad. All this shows that the world socialists position is the only realistic one: no support for capitalist war. No war but the class war.
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