Alan Johnson pens an open letter to a comrade on the attacks today

Dear Friend,

What a terrible day.

We have not spoken for some time. After our work together in the local Stop the War group do you recall how we fell out? In January 2004 you called me a ‘pro-imperialist’ and, I remember, a ‘neocon’, because I wrote an article in support of a war on terror. I had written, “For many left intellectuals and writers the dirty bomb that Al Qaeda was getting closer to creating in its Afghan camps will never be finished and explode in the middle of London or Madrid. From the massacre of ‘westerners’ at Luxor, to the massacre of Jews in Turkey, parts of the left are in denial’.

Do you recall how two months later the terrorists attacked Madrid? I wrote, “It is to be hoped that the bombs, devastating but not ‘dirty’… will make some think again”.

I am writing to you today as Al Qaeda bombs have killed an unknown number in London – it seems the number of fatalities may rise to as many as 60, and who knows how many lives will now be lived forever in pain and anguish.

We stopped speaking altogether when the Stop the War movement circulated a letter written by its leading officers (later retracted) which stated “The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary”. Those words - any means they find necessary - look more chilling than ever today.

At the time I was appalled by them but you were not. You thought there was a ’resistance’ in Iraq and it was doing the work of anti-imperialism. I said it was fascistic and you should be supporting the Iraqi democrats instead. We have not spoken since. Can we now speak again?

Let me try to start us off. I hope you will reply. Forgive the length but there is much to say.

The Threat

I still think we are ‘menaced by theocratic fascism’. Timothy Garton Ash said that before Iraq made it impossible to talk so plainly. We face a ‘totalitarian impulse which varies ideologically from group to group’, as the Dissent writer, Paul Berman, wrote. This threat is organised through networks that are neither states nor state actors, that are not party to international conventions and treaties, and that render meaningless traditional (or Westphalian’) war-goals such as the defeat of an army or the defence of territory. We are also menaced by states – such as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran - that sponsor, promote and protect those networks. The networks dream of taking over the states, of course. Failing states, unable to fend off the networks or safeguard WMD secrets are part of the equation. In Afghanistan the network took over the state, like a Mafia. So the network was removed and the state rebuilt. And that meant rebuilding the nation. My criticism is that it should have been done better. Is yours still – after the fall of the Taliban, after the clearing out of the AQ camps, after the elections, after the girls playing football in Karbul, after the sight of women MPs- that it happened at all?

Tony Blair has warned of an ‘existential threat’: the coming together of WMD and Terror Networks: ‘it is a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together’ and wage ‘war without limit’ (March 5 2004). I still think that is real. Do you still think he is ‘whipping up a story for George Bush’ as you put it?

Denial

But to large parts of the left, yourself included, the terrorists of Al Qaeda were no more real than were the rats of Oran to the dreamy city-dwellers in Camus’s allegorical novel The Plague. You used to quote Michael Moore at me, a man whose appeal to you is beyond me. Moore said ‘There is no threat! Repeat after me, there is no threat!’. Well, there was, and there is. I recall you would also repeat other words Moore (words I thought demented). ‘The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win’. Do you still believe all that?

John Pilger and Tariq Ali, both major figures and leaders of the ‘anti-war’ party, then came out openly with positive declarations of support for the fascistic fundamentalist terrorists and Baathist totalitarians of 'the Resistance' who were massacring their way across Iraq. ‘You can’t be choosy’ said Pilger. ‘Anti-Imperialism’ said Ali. No criticism of Pilger or Ali was forthcoming from you. Then your friends began to like the moloch of the Iraqi ‘resistance’ to the French resistance fighters who fought the Nazis. You kept quiet. ‘The main enemy is Bush’ you said.

So when the staged pulling down of the statute of Bush in Trafalgar Square took place (as if to say 'Aha! Now we will show you whose statute should REALLY have been pulled down!') you couldn’t see a problem. And it was not that the anti-war movement thought there was a moral equivalence between Bush and Bin Laden. It was worse. Many of your new friends really do think Bush is worse. That he, not Osama Bin Laden is, as that nudnik poster has it, ‘The Worlds Number 1 Terrorist’. A legitimate and necessary opposition to US foreign policy was mis-used to minimise or deny or even to indulge the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda and it was a bloody disgrace.

Today the Socialist Workers Party were at it again. By 1.30pm they had got the line straight: “The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan”. In fact the fascists of Al Qaeda were responsible and the SWP are appeasers.

Aldgate East tube is in George Galloway’s constituency, I think. But don’t you think part of his statement was also marked by the spirit of appeasement and was quite remarkable given who these people are and what they aim for (the return of the 7th century Caliphate not a resumption of the Road Map):

“We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.

We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East. Only then will the innocents here and abroad be able to enjoy a life free of the threat of needless violence”.

Today Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone spoke for London not your friends in Respect.

Norman Geras spoke for me. His posts through the day said all I have to say. Here is a part. “They are the enemies of democracy and the enemies of all humankind. They must be fought till they have been defeated.

1. They attack Red Cross personnel.
2. They murder people working for the UN.
3. They kidnap and kill care workers.
4. They bomb holiday-makers, in nightclubs.
5. They blow up people travelling on trains - civilians.
6. They target people on buses - civilians.
7. They take civilian hostages.
8. They decapitate them.
9. They murder trade unionists.
10. They kidnap diplomats.
11. They kill people for being... barbers.
12. They fly aircraft full of civilians into skyscrapers where people are at work.
13. They take schoolchildren hostage and murder them.
14. They bomb synagogues.
15. They kill people shopping in a market.
16. They kill people queuing at a medical clinic.
17. They murder children in Baghdad.
18. They murder people on their way to work in London.

Norman has links for each kind of enormity. You should check them all out. But you were never really convinced that Al Qaeda really existed were you? I heard from a mutual friend that you had been telling everybody how great the much hyped and promoted BBC documentary, ‘The Power of Nightmares’ was. Well, I don’t think they’ll be re-showing that one for a while. I recall I complained that banners for the 9/11 conspiracy websites were prominently displayed at the Trafalgar Square ‘anti-war’ protest. These sites push the idea that the US government, and maybe Mossad, planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks.

I think this kind of thing can only be explained with the resources of depth psychology. Freud would call it denial and repression. Talk of the ‘Power of Nightmares’ was itself a form of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment which facilitated the denial of a particularly painful aspect of the self, a manic defence against the inner significance of an experience, a form of repression of what could not be acknowledged (i.e. the fact that you are, whatever you say to yourself, supporting fascists as a way to give Bush a bloody nose).

Denial is now a mass phenomenon not only on the contemporary liberal-left but also on the right (witness Simon Jenkins, the man who wrote a column in the Times mocking Tony Bair for scaremongering about a non-existent terrorist threat…on the day of the Madrid bombing. And who, after an indecently short interval, has simply carried on writing the same column ever since. Will he stop now? No chance).

Apologetics

We traded insults through a mutual friend when, as the terrorism of al-Qaeda and the Saddam loyalists grows more desperate and barbaric, the apologetics just got worse and worse. The Australian Green Left refused to condemn the bombing of the UN headquarters and Al Qaeda’s massacre of UN staff seeking to rebuild Iraq. The bombing you will recall was ‘anti-imperialist’, the UN being a tool of ‘imperialism’. I think you found that hard to swallow but changed the subject back to Blair-Bush. In fact you’ve been doing a lot of that haven’t you? Whenever the ‘resistance’ committed an atrocity you have been pretending to yourself that it is really a Bush-Blair atrocity (just as the SWP pretend to themselves today). They aren’t you know.

And why do you always put scare quotes around the word terrorism. After today will you drop those scare quotes? Isn’t now the time to accept what Paul Berman says, that with “the end of the taboo against staging gigantic massacres in the United States, the rise of an extremely sophisticated international terrorist underground, the steady development of nuclear and other terrible weapons by the Ba’ath and other wings of the totalitarian movement – all these developments signal…the approach of gigantic calamities. That is why we have to roll back the totalitarian movement in each of its wings’ (Berman 2003).

We must take full measure of the terrorist threat and develop the response accordingly.

Respect

I hear you have been flirting with Respect. You should be careful of the company you are keeping. Do you know what links John Rees and George Galloway, the leaders of Respect with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and ‘Sheikh Hassan Zarkani, representative of the Al Sadr movement, Iraq’. They all formed the platform of the Third ‘Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Cairo Conference’.

The ‘Cairo Conference’ was launched in 2002. At it, the Iraqi delegation to the Cairo Conference was headed by Nabil Negm (an under-secretary in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry who rose to become chief political adviser to Saddam Hussein) and Saad Qassem Hammoudy (a leading member of the Baath Party, Secretary-General of the Iraqi Conference of Arab Popular Forces, and Iraqi Ambassador to the Arab League. Key speakers alongside these Saddamists were John Rees of Respect and George Galloway. Among the other participants were Moustafa Bakri, editor of the Egyptian magazine Al Osboa, a publication renowned for its denunciations of homosexuality and human rights activists. In 1999 the International Human Rights Federation published a report accusing Bakri of ties to the Egyptian security services’.

The Iraqi Communist Party described the first Cairo Conference as “a conference of solidarity with Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

In 2003 the Cairo Conference coincided with the capture of Saddam Hussein. As news filtered through that the tyrant had been caught it was George Galloway who expressed the outrage of the conference. ‘But Galloway had taken the microphone. “The Prisoner is Saddam,” he said, “he’s been paraded on the TV screens and he’s been virtually humiliated. His enemies are having a good laugh but it won’t be the last laugh,” at which point applause filled the hall’ (Al-Ahram Weekly Online report of the second ‘Anti-Zionist and Anti-Imperialist Conference’, held at Cairo, Egypt).

At the final press conference of the Second Cairo conference John Rees sat happily between George Galloway, the man who hailed Saddam Hussein and spent Christmas with Tariq Aziz, Ramsey Clarke, defender of Radovan Karadzic and a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosovic and Azzam Tamimi, who, according to Louise Ellman MP, speaking in the House of Commons, is an advisor to Hamas who hopes the Jews drown with the boats they are driven out of Israel in (Tamimi denies these charges).

A new political force is emerging, part ‘anti-imperialist’, part fascistic, each chasing a purity without spot. The Rees-Galloway project is to yoke the left to ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’. The democratic left needs to raise our dropped jaw and take its measure. We could do with your support in that.

Who are the bombers?

You said to me last time we argued that you thought the rise of Jihadi Fundamentalism was only blowback against imperialism and was therefore progressive. I spluttered some profanity and left. Sorry. Let me try and explain more fully, much more fully, why I do not agree with your tacit support for these forces.

When he was a socialist, Max Shachtman argued that if capitalist society continued to decay and if the working class failed to lead an alliance of forces to a progressive democratic collectivism then a totalitarian doppelganger, Stalinism, could emerge as a reactionary alternative to impose a reactionary ”bureaucratic collectivism.” While history never repeats itself, we can use the logical structure of Shachtman’s analysis – “if…if…then” – to fathom the rise of Jihadic Islamic Fundamentalism.

If the national, secular, often state-capitalist, modernizing projects of the bourgeoisie and state elites fail to develop the society and culture, and become stalled in corruption, tyranny, and cultural stagnation (in 2001 only 300 books were published in Egypt), leaving the rulers unable to secure the support of large sections of the middle class…

If global capitalist competition, penetration, and dislocation presses upon that middle class, sending it into panic and rage, disintegrating welfare systems established by the state-capitalist regimes in the post-war period, ravaging old social relationships but not creating new ones, threatening the old exploiting classes – the bazaar merchants, the religious establishment, sometimes landlords…

If the political leaderships and organizations of the Left are widely discredited for having tailed the nationalist projects of the bourgeoisie (the Egyptian CP dissolved into Nasser’s front in the 1960s, for instance), and if the working class is weak and not organized independently…

Then not only the middle classes (small manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, market merchants, frustrated university graduates) but also those classes created by primitive capital accumulation and pauperization, a cast-off sub-proletariat, a mass of marginalized semi-proletarian poor and distressed petit-bourgeois (who were, in truth, never really won over to secularism during the post-war years) are “opened up” for recruitment by the traditional intellectuals of political Islam, the ulemas. These forces can be swept up into a mass movement aimed inchoately at “the West” or “Imperialism” or “the Infidels,” chasing the entirely reactionary “solution” (actually incapable of implementation) of using modern military technology and, they hope, state power, to turn back the clock to the pure Islamic state of the 7th century based on Sharia law.

Each of these pre-conditions for the rise of political Islam can be found, with national peculiarities of course, in the countries that have suffered its spectacular rise.

The Islamic Fundamentalists appeal to a deep sense of humiliation. Bernard Lewis, in his book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, is right to focus attention upon that anguished question which torments the Islamic world: how did the very fulcrum of civilization become dependent, defeated, backward, corrupt, and poverty-stricken? The Fundamentalists say “they did it!” pointing to a cast of villains such as “infidels,” “westernizers,” corrupt oil sheiks, Jews, and uppity women.
Fundamentalist Islamic intellectuals such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawlana Mawdudi, and Ruhollah Khomeni laid the foundations for the rise of Political Islam. When modern secular nationalism stalled amid defeat and failure in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Stalinist-led workers’ movements lost the allegiance of major social layers, then the Islamists became the repository of the hopes and dreams of millions. In turn, the Islamists worked tirelessly to redefine those dreams as nihilist fantasies. The result has been a wave of Islamist political militancy and violence from Iran to Algeria, Sudan to Afghanistan, Kashmir to Chechnya, and, in the form of al-Qaeda, a global Jihadic terrorist network.
How does this mayhem connect up to Shachtman’s idea that “capitalism is decaying”? It depends how “decay” is defined. If Shachtman meant the “decline of the productive forces” then he was just plain wrong. The global explosion in the productive forces of the post-1945 world, and the surge in life expectancy and living standards associated with it, speaks for itself. World GDP increased six-fold from 1950-1998, with an average growth rate of nearly 4 per cent a year, according to the OECD. Real GDP per capita rose by 2.1 per cent a year between 1950 and 1998. That compares with less than 1 per cent a year between 1820 and 1950.

In fact Shachtman defined decay rather differently: “To say that capitalism is decaying is to say that it is increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems of society, of maintaining economic and political order.” That is an accurate indictment of the “runaway world” of the 21st century: a voracious, amoral capitalism eats up the resources of the planet, churns up communities, mocks social institutions from the family to representative democracy, and turns everything it touches – and it touches everything – into a commodity to be bought and sold. This pathology generates a counter-pathology: an irredentist throwback to a simpler time of order, tradition, tribe, and blood.
We have tamed the irrational forces of nature but we remain at the mercy of irrational social and political forces we have created, from the religion of the market to the market place of religions. Humanity is kept in a state of suicidal macro-irrationality “increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems.”
The Jihadis offer no answer to any of this. They are a desperate, anti-modern reaction to the impasse. And half the region are aged 25 or under.

If the democrats are to push them aside, and reconnect with Muslim workers and diverse progressive elements in society who experience the Fundamentalists as their mortal foe, then we must first define them correctly as a deadly enemy not a potential ally.

The bombers are fascistic

When Islamic Fundamentalism first emerged the Left defined it as analogous to fascism. The Arab Trotskyist Salah Jaber wrote in 1981 that “Islamic Fundamentalism is one of the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary proletariat.” He pointed out that “the fundamentalist movement shares many of the characteristics of fascism outlines by Trotsky: its social base, the nature of its political ideology, its fierce anti-communism and its totalitarianism”. But there were also differences between classical fascism and fundamentalism. In some respects “the fundamentalist movement is, in fact, more backward than was fascism”. It drives the historical clock backward to a reactionary utopia with more faith and zeal than the classical fascists. But the Fundamentalists, as part of this “more reactionary” drive backwards, can also challenge big private capital. This contrasts to the role of classical fascism as the brutish guarantor of big capital in the face of a mass workers movement. All this means socialists will find themselves on the same demonstration, protesting the same social ill, from time to time. However “any compromises proposed by the fundamentalists as a result of this type of situation pose enormous dangers for all sections of the left, both moral and physical”. Tactical flexibility must be balanced against the overriding political conclusion that it was “absolutely and under all circumstances necessary to combat its ‘reactionary and medieval influence.’” Even the so-called “anti-imperialism” of the Fundamentalists, Jaber pointed out, does not amount to what socialists mean by that term. It represents only an inchoate reactionary hostility to “the hated ‘west’…all the political and social gains of the bourgeois revolution”.

Compare Jaber’s approach to a Lindsey German chasing ‘the Muslim vote’, a George Galloway denouncing the free Iraqi trade unionists as ‘Quislings’ in the Arab press, as John Rees, cosying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, or a Professor Alex Callinicos, sniffily waving away the “hullaballo” about the torture and murder of Hadi Saleh, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, by the ‘resistance’. That left is finished whatever its noisy show.

It is finished because once Fundamentalism gained a mass base and - all-important, this, for an essentially anti-American left - came into conflict with the USA, then some (forgetting that the possession of a mass base was also typical of classical fascism, forgetting that totalitarian Russia was also in conflict with the USA) allowed their rhetoric about the USA being “the heart of the beast” to merge with the political Islamists’ talk of “the Great Satan.” Reactionary Islamic Fundamentalism was now redefined as “Radical Islam” and the anti-Semitic zealots of Hamas, for instance, were redefined as bone fide “anti-imperialist” forces.

This redefinition was part of a wider collapse of radical politics. Too often leftists halt at a merely negative and inchoate oppositionism to whatever the U.S. is doing. A complex world has been reduced to a face-off between two camps, “Imperialism” versus “the Resistance.” (the crudity is dressed up in post-structuralese, and you can wave your copies of Negri at me all you want, but crudity it is). These leftists define the political Islamists as part of “the Resistance,” and, of course, in that act redefine themselves as the critical supporters of the political Islamists. The price paid in the West has been the loss of independent political judgement and much idiocy about, for instance, the “anti-imperialism” of groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Elsewhere the price has been much higher. In 1977 in Pakistan, the Left sided with Jamat al-Islami against Bhutto, imagining a tactical alliance against a common enemy. They were used and then jailed. During the Iranian Revolution negative oppositionism and inchoate “anti-imperialism” pushed the Left into the arms of Khomeini, the so-called “objective anti-imperialist.” They were led to his gallows.

An Alternative

Our job is to push on past a stalled modernity and a demented reaction. How? By a consistent fight for global democratisation and global development, or, if we can put it this way, making tyranny history and making poverty history. That’s how the decent left we need will come to know itself and challenge the pro-tyrant left we have. But that’s a discussion we can have. There are a hundred discussions we need to have. Are we talking again?

Best wishes,
Alan Johnson