Paris Attacks
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Matt wrote:As for some motivation in Iraq of some ISIS fighters.http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
Thanks for that, Matt.
Matts link wrote:More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation…Surprise, surprise.It's not 'Islam' that's the cause, but Western destruction of their societies. These "27 year old men with two kids" are the 'scum' that were mentioned earlier.YMS's solution of cutting the oil profits from ISIS will not change Western foreign policy.Capitalism needs oil and its profits.
LBird wrote:It's not 'Islam' that's the cause, but Western destruction of their societies. These "27 year old men with two kids" are the 'scum' that were mentioned earlier.YMS's solution of cutting the oil profits from ISIS will not change Western foreign policy.Capitalism needs oil and its profits.Lbird,I'll note that America did not invade Syria. America hasn't invaded Mexico, yet we still have similar outfits there.Tagretting IS' money supply is not, and never has been my 'solution', merely an observation that capitalist states could, if they wanted, do something effective against that organisation, other than killing people; and a general observation that anything that stops (or lessens) the killing is to be welcomed (including preventing the Western states using their war machines).
http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/paris-attacks-middle-easts-wars-arrive-europe/25934Jon Snow makes some interesting points about the role of Saudi Arabia (and, indeed, the comprrador rulers there have their own interests in this game).
Quote:The more the Royal family bows to Western demands for women’s rights — car driving, voting, and the rest – the worse the confrontation with the Wahhabi zealots becomes. Indeed a recently retired British General, well versed in Saudi relations, told me only last week that if the House of Saud were to fall, the consequences for the world could be devastating. Yet there is a terrifying fusion between the Western resentment of the Saudi Royal Family’s failure to modernise, and the Islamic State’s conviction that the country’s rules have already joined the ranks of blasphemers.Iran is a player too. Those two facts alone suggest there isn't a military means to protect the people in the region. Oh, and of course Turkey, too.
Young Master Smeet wrote:Lbird,I'll note that America did not invade Syria. America hasn't invaded Mexico, yet we still have similar outfits there.But capitalism has 'invaded' both Syria and Mexico, YMS.And America is the most powerful economic, political and military, capitalist state.Perhaps your avoidance of 'capitalism' (the cause), and focus on ISIS (a symptom), is the problem.You seem to be aiming for 'nice capitalism': a world in which sophisticated Parisians are 'safe from terror', but billions of 'terrorist-supporting' workers aren't.We really should be saying that the French state murdered those innocents in Paris, rather than messing around with giving advice to government terrorists, on how to 'stop the killing'.
Yes, that's why I'm saying the solution is world socialism. However, the French state did not kill those people in Paris, a bunch of brigands did. The FRench state killed an unstated number of people in Raqqa in retaliation, I wanty to protect those people because socialism is no fucking use to a corpse. To that end, my duty is to constrain the capacity of the killing machine within my reach/means, the British state, and the same is true of workers of all lands.That means strangling their attempts to claim that murder is the only option.Anyway, you're entirely right that capitalism has invaded Mexico, and Syria, and IS are just another capitalist enterprise.Anyway, since it seems I need to clarify: "the priority is saving the lives of people in the region.(i.e. Syria, Iraq, etc.)"
Young Master Smeet wrote:To that end, my duty is to constrain the capacity of the killing machine within my reach/means, the British state, and the same is true of workers of all lands.That means strangling their attempts to claim that murder is the only option.“These armed forces, therefore, will only be set in motion to further the interests of the class who control them – the master class – “THE SOCIALIST PARTY of Great Britain pledges itself to keep the issue clear by expounding the CLASS STRUGGLE, and whilst placing on record its abhorrence of this latest manifestation of the callous, sordid, and mercenary nature of the international capitalist class, and declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working class blood, enters its emphatic protest against the brutal and bloody butchery of our brothers of this and other lands who are being used as food for cannon abroad while suffering and starvation are the lot of their fellows at home.“Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.“THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!“August 25th, 1914,
Here's something that might be of interesthttp://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/cancer-modern-capitalism-1323585268
Young Master Smeet wrote:However, the French state did not kill those people in Paris, a bunch of brigands did.Yeah, 'the French state' didn't, in the same way that Adolf didn't kill those Jews in the death camps, a 'bunch of brigands' in the SS did.Of course, you're perfectly correct to say the French state didn't pull the triggers, but it created the trigger-pullers.
YMS wrote:To that end, my duty is to constrain the capacity of the killing machine within my reach/means, the British state…The sooner we tell workers in Britain that the British state is busy right now creating the 'trigger-pullers' of the next atrocity to happen in London, the better.The British state will be responsible. Not a 'bunch of brigands'.
The comments are all very interesting and seems to be concentrated upon how to solve the situation of IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh (seems we can't even agree upon what to call them), and doing the thinking for the ruling class it sort of seems to me but no-one has responded to my request about what we can do as a socialist movement with our extremely limited resources.We all appear to have something to say about the realpolitik but nothing about the very mundane question of what we ourselves can do. I do note positively that we have now issued a press release but perhaps we could have targetted it to muslim newspapers, eg The Muslim Newshttp://epaperdaily.com/uk-newspapers/the-muslim-news-paper-uk.htmlAnd perhaps to go further so that our views are seen we could perhaps take out some paid adverts in selected media. Can we perhaps increase our Arabic and Urdu language literature even if it may mean employing the services of a translator if we have no-one qualified?Could we put out a pamphlet specifically on Islam?…(we do possess some insightful articles on Islam and banking that could be incorporated into a religious pamphlet)Once again and no one have yet commented nay or yeah on my idea that we can invite a guest speaker to speak on Marxism and Muslim apostasy. With a billion and a half who profess adherence to Islam, sooner or later we must try to convince them that they are as mistaken as Christians, Hindus and Buddhists.
Alan,I have been suggesting what we can do: talk down the IS threat, and tell people how it really is (and join in any anti-war movement as we did when Iraq was threatened).
Socialist Party press release regarding Paris terrorist attacksIssued: 15th November 2015Paris, Friday the 13th, November 2015. Yet another atrocity in the name of religion. A deliberate attempt to kill as many innocent people as possible, at a pop concert, an international football match, and at random in the streets. Of course there was a political motive behind it. It was as President Hollande said, an act of war.The ‘Islamic State’, which governs parts of Syria and Iraq, to which the perpetrators owed allegiance and on whose behalf they carried out the atrocity, is at war with various ordinary capitalist states – Syria, Iraq, the United States, Russia, Britain and, of course, France, as well as others.Deliberately targeting civilians is against the Geneva Convention but not, apparently, against sharia law nor (if you are on the winning side) againstrealpolitik, as Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki show. Once a war starts in the end anything goes because, if a state loses, then even the life of its rulers is at stake, let alone their position as rulers or the economic interests of its capitalists.We are dealing, then, with a war atrocity, and wars arise from capitalism. They occur when, in the competition between states for sources of raw material, trade routes, markets, investment outlets and strategic points and areas to protect and acquire these, the rulers of a capitalist state feel that their ‘vital interests’ are at stake and that they have more to lose by not going to war.In the Middle East what’s at stake is who controls its oil resources and the routes by which the oil reaches the rest of the world. The US and its allies (‘the West’) have been determined to control this and largely do, but this control has always been challenged by local elites. During the Cold War period these used secular nationalism to win mass support, but in 1979 Iran set a new trend, which has since become dominant, by exploiting religion instead. So, anti-Western feeling there, expressing the interests of local elites, now takes the form of militant Islam.In 2002 President George W Bush denounced Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’. The US State Department quickly added Cuba, Libya and Syria. These all became targets for ‘regime change’. The first to undergo this was Iraq, then Libya, with disastrous results in both cases. Syria was to be the third. This attempt has had an even worse result. Playing the Sunni Muslim card, financed and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has created a monster that has taken the already extreme version of Islam imposed in Saudi Arabia to an even further extreme, wanting to go back to the 8thcentury and employing the barbarous methods of that time to get there.The reaction in France to the atrocity has been to treat it as an attack on the ‘French nation’ whereas it was more accurately an attack on the French state. The result has been a reinforcement of French nationalism of the mistaken 'sacred union' between workers and the ruling class there. Yet atrocities committed in the name of the nationalism of so-called ‘nation-states’ are less than those of religion only because these have not been around for so long.The anarchist Bakunin raised the slogan ‘Neither God, nor Master’. Adapting it as our response to the Paris atrocity: Neither God, nor State, but Humanity.SPGB Media Committee
alanjjohnstone wrote:. With a billion and a half who profess adherence to Islam, sooner or later we must try to convince them that they are as mistaken as Christians, Hindus and Buddhists.Why bother Alan? Religions have always been adaptable. Far better to focus simply on the objectionable social policies that various religions endorse rather than metaphysics of religion as such. Then everything else will fall into line. Socialist believers within these religions themselves will be a factor in bringing about this adaptation If you going to try to get Islamists, Christians Hindus Buddhists et al to believe that they are mistaken in a blanket sort of way then you have set yourself the task of Sisyphus. Its just not going to happen and the sooner comrades wake up to this fact the better, The secularisation thesis is just not working out and was never likely to“Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population”http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050
robert.cox wrote:…our response to the Paris atrocity: Neither God, nor State, but Humanity.[my bold]But it's a section of 'Humanity' that is responsible for these atrocities (Paris '15, and others, like Paris '61), so lining up with an undifferentiated 'humanity' simply continues the pretence that "we're all in it together" and hides the truth that "the ruling class are responsible".Surely a socialist/communist slogan should read "Neither God, nor State, but Our Class"?Of course, it lacks the 'populist' touch, but whilst capitalism is popular, our message will continue to grate with the majority.But that's no reason to stop 'grating the minds of the majority' – we have to promote critical thought amongst workers, not tack with the media wind. Some will listen now, and as the 'remedies' of the Western governments make things worse, and cause yet more atrocities both in the Middle East and Europe, more will begin to listen, if there is a clear alternative.
YMS, i have seen your comments that you seek to equate IS with some criminal cocaine cartel and i expect that this is what you mean by talking down IS.I'm not sure your analogy is the right one but i cannot claim even any confidence in my own opinions. IS regardless of what we want to think do possess an ideology, political and religious and it has an appeal well outside its home in Iraq and Syria. It has replaced or supplanted Al Qaida. So to a degree it is successful in the battlefield of ideas and cross cultural. I'm first to hold up my hands and express ignorance and bewilderment and i am only posting to see if we can determine an understanding. From my first post, things are going as i feared…refugees are being used as a scapegoat and will endure more suffereing, mass protests in Paris will be strictly policed and the resistance to COP21 will be somewhat muffled, and calls for increased military action are being called and we can expect public opinion to swing over to Cameron and his hawks. Robbo, why bother responding in anyway to religious fundamentalism, whether it is IS terror or assassination of abortion clinic doctors? I agree that we don't end social ills by arguments which i think is what you mean. Only by the creation of a just equitable economic system removes the core root causes of religion. Like the State religion withers on the vine when socialism is established , but we cannot have socialism without the acceptance and cooperation of the majority of people which means we have to devise an approach that is inclusive of those with religious beliefs.You will say you have the better way than than the exclusivity of the SPGB. But you yourself if i interpret your past posts have a fairly narrow definition of socialists with religious ideas, ie you also cannot accommodate any who adhere to various church canon or whatever, there has to a "revolution" within many religions…some say the process is now going on in christianity but can we say that with the election of Modi and murders of beef-eaters in India, just to use another example that is not muslim fundamentalism, is this "revolutionary" transformation of religion really happening? I tend to feel that even if we don't have any effective influence, and we don't have that effect on many aspects of life eg economics etc but what we can do, we do. That means exposing religions even if we don't get the audience LBird rightly says we won't because of the unpopularity of our message. But we have to keep that message alive and not let it get confused by the "new atheists"YMS says we should talk down IS? How? Isn't the fact that the vast majority of commentators are already pushing that line. Should we widen the debate to include all the religious as potential and possible extremists?Again, i emphasise i have no answers and seek only to learn what we can do as a socialist party with what resources we possess, admittedly not much but certaily more resources than we all possess as individuals
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