Imperialist War Engenders Islamist Terror

After the Slaughter in Paris:
Down with the State of Emergency,
U.S./France Out of the Middle East!

The horrific attacks against civilians in six different locations in Paris on the night of November 13 were the long-expected blowback from the imperialist terror bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria over the last 15 months. The murders by the Islamic State (I.S.) in the French capital, which killed over 130 people and wounded more than 400, many of them still in critical condition, were an attack against working people everywhere. Such indiscriminate terror is fundamentally counterposed to a struggle against imperialism. It inevitably generates mass chauvinism in the targeted population, putting Muslims and immigrants in particular at risk, in France and elsewhere, and serving as an excuse to escalate imperialist war in the Middle East.

French president François Hollande immediately seized on the attacks to bomb Raqqa, Syria, the reputed capital of the I.S. (also known as ISIS or ISIL). U.S. president Barack Obama vowed to intensify the American air war in the region, whose death tolls far exceed the night of terror in Paris. (Drone strikes okayed by Obama have killed over 3,800 people, including hundreds of civilians.) Meanwhile, the bourgeois government of “socialist” Hollande has imposed a state of emergency in France cancelling constitutional guarantees. He is demanding that parliament extend it for three months (!) and that the constitution be amended to include a “state of crisis” which would prolong police-state measures indefinitely, threatening the democratic rights of all.

Since the onset of the U.S.-led “war on terror,” launched immediately after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attack on the NYC World Trade Center and Pentagon, the League for the Fourth International and the Internationalist Group/U.S. have called to “defeat the U.S./NATO drive for war and repression.”¹ Since Obama began bombing Iraq and Syria a year ago, we have called to “Drive U.S./NATO Imperialists Out of the Middle East!”² Imperialist war and occupation have engendered Islamist terror, and the response to the Paris attacks must be to demand that the U.S. and France get out of Iraq and Syria, as well as Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, where since early 2013 Hollande has been waging a war against Islamist jihadis in Mali.

And just as it was an elementary duty to denounce the post-9/11 U.S.A. PATRIOT Act as an assault on fundamental civil liberties, revolutionary Marxists in France should oppose the state of emergency and the “security at all costs” constitutional amendment tooth and nail, including seeking to mobilize workers in the streets against the government policies of war and repression. It is moreover an urgent duty of class-conscious workers to defend immigrants and refugees as well as the millions of people of immigrant origin under police siege or facing racist and fascist attacks, from the camps of Calais to the banlieues (working-class suburbs) outside Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other French cities, as well as in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

The War Comes Home

For the second time in less than a year, Paris was the scene of a massacre. In January, there was the killing spree that began with the execution of the editor and caricaturists of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and ended with the killing of Jewish customers at a kosher supermarket. In response, the government called for “national unity,” bringing over four million people into the streets to march behind capitalist heads of state against “terrorism” while singing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. This was accompanied by a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and government denunciation of students in the banlieues who dared to say “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I’m not Charlie) due to the magazine’s anti-Muslim and racist caricatures.

In January, revolutionary internationalists, while upholding freedom of the press in the face of this “grotesque terror attack,” also declared “we are not Charlie,” denounced chauvinist “national unity” and French imperialism’s colonial wars, and called to defend immigrants.³ This time around, after the November 13 attacks, the call by Prime Minister Manuel Valls on the parties to unite went nowhere. Nor were there any marches, only warmongering rhetoric and repression. On the first two days of the “state of emergency,” almost 300 raids were carried out by police without judicial authorization, jailing dozens and placing over 100 people under house arrest on the basis of suspicion of Islamist militancy, but no proof of any actions.

While the November 13 attacks were indiscriminately directed at the population as a whole, the I.S. itself underscored their Islamist⁴ character, aiming them against “pagans” and infidels. A majority of the victims were under 30, including many from the heavily immigrant suburbs. The Islamic State has often struck at the civilian population in Syria and Iraq in the name of its religious jihad (holy war). In its statement claiming the attacks, the I.S. said the attackers were “hoping to be killed for Allah’s sake … in support of His religion,” called Paris the “capital of prostitution and vice,” described the crowd at the Bataclan music hall as “hundreds of pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and debauchery,” and rejoiced over the deaths of the victims whom it called “crusaders.” Not even a pretense of striking at the imperialist state.

Even so, the Paris attack was indeed, as François Hollande told French legislators, an “act of war” – Hollande’s war. More specifically, it was what Pentagon strategists call “asymmetric warfare,” in which the weaker side attacks “soft” targets – in this case civilians unable to defend themselves. And the imperialist leaders knew it was coming the minute they started bombing. The hundreds of casualties, dead and wounded, in Paris are the “collateral damage” of the U.S.-led war on the Islamic State, only this time the wanton killing shocks Western sensibilities because it occurs “at home,” not in some far-off land invisible to the citizenry, and it instills fear, as intended.

There was no such outcry about another indiscriminate suicide-bombing by the I.S. that killed 43 people the day before in Beirut, Lebanon. On the contrary, the initial headline of the New York Times (13 November) called the targeted neighborhood of southern Beirut a “stronghold” of the Shiite Hezbollah militia (which is aiding the Syrian government), as if to justify the terror attack. Nor was there international commotion when at least 99 people were killed in an attack on a peace demonstration called by left-wing unions and Kurdish parties in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, on October 10. Or when 34 socialist youth were killed in Suruc on July 20. These terror attacks were carried out by Islamists in league with sectors of the Turkish state. Since Turkey is an “ally” and member of NATO, its crimes are unmentioned.

And while the French president denounces “the enemy” – the I.S. – as “barbarians,” there is no mention about how this terrorist force was for years armed by the imperialists and their regional allies and puppets (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.) in their failed attempt to bring down the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, seen as an ally of Iran and stumbling block for imposing a Pax Americana in the region. Not a word about how Hollande secretly approved shipments of thousands of arms to Islamist gangs in Syria who then joined the Al Qaeda affiliate and eventually the Islamic State. Or about how the casualties inflicted by the I.S. “dogs of war” who have slipped the leash in Paris are only a fraction of those caused by their former masters.

130 lives cruelly taken away in the City of Lights – that’s how many victims U.S. warplanes take out every time they hit a wedding party in Afghanistan, which they do with sickening regularity. What about the 600,000+ violent deaths between 2003 and 2006 due to the U.S. invasion of occupation of Iraq, including some 100,000 caused by aerial bombing, according to the report by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health published in the respected British medical journal Lancet? Or the over 1 million Iraqis who died because of the United Nations economic sanctions between 1991 and 1998, including over 500,000 children, according to surveys by the United Nations Children’s Fund?

Faced with the utter failure of the U.S. (and French) war campaign against the I.S., two policy options are being weighed by the “great” and not-so-great powers: intensify the bombing and oust Assad in Damascus, or intensify the bombing in conjunction with the Assad regime. Both depend on the policy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.⁵ Hard-line war hawk Democrats and Republicans in Washington and “socialist” Hollande in Paris want to topple the Syrian president, but not have the regime apparatus collapse, a nearly impossible scenario. The “realists” want to work in tandem with Russia, Iran and Assad without saying so or openly collaborating. In either case, the elusive goal is a “peace” imposed by the imperialist mass murderers and their reactionary allies.

The League for the Fourth International calls instead to drive out and defeat the imperialists and their allies. As we have repeatedly stated, “Every blow struck against the NATO marauders, even by the atavistic jihadis (holy warriors) of the I.S., is in the interests of the exploited and oppressed. The ‘democratic’ militarists are by far the biggest mass murderers (and exploiters and oppressors) on the planet” (“Flashpoint Syria”). From Afghanistan in the 1980s on, Trotskyists emphatically opposed the Islamist cutthroats, whose services the imperialists repeatedly used against targets from the Soviet Union to the Middle East. And we do so today calling for workers revolution to smash the I.S. and all the Sunni and Shiite Islamist, Zionist, militarist and authoritarian regimes that oppress the peoples of the region.

No to the State of Emergency – Defend Muslims and Immigrants!

“La patrie en danger!” (the Fatherland is in danger) cry French rulers whenever they want to step up repression. And the (bourgeois) republican and (reformist) socialist left invariably snaps to attention, saluting the tricolor flag and intoning the Marseillaise. It was no different this time. At the Congress of Versailles on November 16, Communist Party (PCF) senator Éliane Assassi declared that in the face of the attacks, “the state of emergency is fully justified,” while piously appealing for “respect of public liberties.” Left Party (PG) leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon greeted Hollande’s declaration that the “security pact is superior to the financial stability pact,” while ironically expressing doubts about his “staggering addition to imagined security.”

The French president began his speech to the Congress declaring, “France is at war,” as if this was something new. France, which refused to join the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, has been bombing the I.S. in Iraq and now Syria since Obama launched his war there in September 2014. But Hollande’s war is above all against the “enemy within.” He went on to call not only to extend the State of Emergency for three months, but also to add thousands of new police officers, to create a National Guard, to amend the Constitution to introduce an ongoing “state of crisis,” to shut down mosques that “preach hatred” and deport their imams, to permit the cancellation of French citizenship and deportation even of those born in France, and to ban them from returning to France if the government decides they “represent a terrorist risk.”

In addition, Hollande is demanding the government’s right to use “the whole range of intelligence techniques offered by new technology” by administrative decision (i.e., without a court order), to tighten gun control and to expand police officers’ right to use their weapons so they can shoot at will “in legitimate defense.” He gave parliament until Friday to vote yes.⁶ In short, this pudgy social-democratic wannabe Napoléon just took over the security program of the right-wing parties in the name of fighting a “war against terrorism.” Fascist National Front leader Marine Le Pen grimaced and made approving noises while saying Hollande didn’t go “far enough” in the “indispensable cleaning out of the cellars and suburbs gangrened by criminality.”

If, so far, there hasn’t been a wave of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attacks as there was after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the fascists are laying the basis for it by whipping up hysteria against Syrian refugees. The government, meanwhile, is using police to attack migrant camps, notably the “Jungle” at Calais, near the entrance to the Channel tunnel linking France to Britain. In recent days, 1,800 police have besieged the camp. CRS riot cops lob tear-gas grenades while Nazis in hoods attack migrants near the Eurotunnel. Dozens of residents have been put on planes to camps in the South, and on November 12 construction equipment began bulldozing dwellings, supposedly to build a “safer” camp (consisting of shipping containers!) that would hold only a quarter of the 6,000 living there now.

The report that one of the Paris attackers had a Syrian passport and may have arrived in the wave of refugees a couple of months ago has led right-wing demagogues to claim that migrants are being used as a cover to smuggle in terrorists. The same hysterical appeals are echoed in the United States, not only by the execrable Donald Trump but also “mainstream” Republican governors who announced they would not take any Syrian refugees, even though many are fleeing from areas controlled by the I.S. (and bombed by the U.S.). Now the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a vile racist bill tightening restrictions on these refugees, with dozens of Democrats joining the Republicans in the vote. At the same time, local police, Homeland Security and the FBI are ominously stepping up surveillance, while intelligence agencies want to reinstate monitoring of all e-mails and phone calls.

Across Europe, immigrants and refugees are feeling the heat of an anti-foreigner backlash against the dramatic wave of migration from the Middle East, including threats of violence, fascist attacks and official repression. While Balkan countries seal off borders with barbed wire, in Germany, the far-right Pegida (European Patriots Against the Islamization of the West) movement regularly brings out 10,000 to 20,000 demonstrators in Dresden to demand closing the borders. Arson and other attacks on asylum facilities in Germany are skyrocketing, with 580 registered so far this year compared to 198 in all of 2014, with Nazis implicated in many. This underscores the urgency of organizing workers defense of immigrants, in France, Germany, Belgium and elsewhere.

Despite the immigrant-bashing war frenzy, Parisians’ most common form of “resistance” has been to have a drink at the local café or bistro. But the main danger is from the government as it escalates the war in Iraq and Syria and seeks to impose police-state measures indefinitely. The state of emergency which was used by future Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand against Algerian independence fighters in the 1950s and after the generals’ putsch in 1961, which allows the government to ban demonstrations and meetings, censor media, carry out arbitrary searches and seizures, impose curfews and house arrests, even set up military tribunals, is not sufficient for the va-t-en-guerre (warmonger) Hollande. He wants all those powers and more, permanently.

Build a Revolutionary Internationalist Party

What’s urgently needed in the wake of the Paris attacks is a revolutionary opposition to the imperialist aggression and bonapartist repressive measures “at home.” Certainly that won’t come from the reformist, long-since social-democratized PCF, whose Senate spokeswoman said they would “study” Hollande’s call for more police powers. Unions led by the PCF and PS have dutifully called off strikes and mobilizations. One canceled walkout was that scheduled for Air France on November 19 to protest massive layoffs and arrests after their militant strike last month when incensed workers tore the shirts off top airline executives. (CFDT and CGT union leaders shamefully distanced themselves from the workers’ bold action.)

But even groups traditionally classified as “far left” have almost all tacitly gone along with the government. Reformist pseudo-Trotskyists like the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA), led by followers of the late Ernest Mandel, and Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), part of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers International, take exception to calls for “national unity,” say that this is “their war, our dead” (NPA), “not our war” (GR), and criticize the state of emergency. But beyond these abstract bromides neither they nor other groups like Lutte Ouvrière (LO) are calling to mobilize in the streets to demand France get out of Syria and Iraq – i.e., not only opposing the state of emergency in words but defying the bans on demonstrations.

The reason there is not now and has not been a mass struggle against French bombardment in the Middle East is that these opportunists largely share the same policy as the ruling Socialist Party, calling for support to the supposedly “moderate” Islamist armed gangs against the Assad regime in Syria. The NPA, which is the most egregious, has even demanded, repeatedly, that Hollande – i.e., the French imperialist government – arm the “Free Syrian Army”! In fact, Hollande admitted last year that France had been surreptitiously doing just that. (In the U.S. there have been no major antiwar protests since Obama began bombing: since liberals support the war on the I.S., the opportunist leftists who tail after them stay home.)

As for the state of emergency, almost the entire French left is “electoral cretinist” to the core. Even though “far left” parties get a tiny percentage of the vote and almost no one elected, they devote a huge amount of their efforts to participating in the capitalist election shell game. They are not about to risk their ballot status, or the government subsidies they receive for running candidates, by violating a government ban on demos. Yes, Bolsheviks can make use of the rigged electoral platform to put forward our revolutionary program, but it is hardly a main focus of activity. If anti-parliamentarism is an “infantile disorder of communism,” as Lenin wrote, the ingrained electoralism of the French left is a sign of social-democratic senile dementia.

In the Middle East, Islamist forces have mushroomed because of the failure of the Stalinist left and the bourgeois nationalist regimes it supported to confront imperialism and offer an alternative to the grinding poverty and social disintegration of neo-colonial capitalism. Likewise in France and elsewhere in Europe, the reactionary jihadis recruit among disaffected Muslim youth who see no future for themselves amid the opulence of the imperialist metropole, and no revolutionary alternative to their degrading life. If when residents of the banlieues rose up in 2005 against police brutality, French leftists and workers had come out to set up defense guards around the besieged HLM (housing projects), it would be a very different story today.

Any of the three major organizations in France claiming some affinity to Trotskyism had the numbers and wherewithal to do that. But for that what’s required above all is a Leninist and Trotskyist program of revolutionary action, and that they were lacking. The heinous killings in Paris, the never-ending imperialist butchery in the Middle East and the intensifying police repression everywhere cry out for an authentically Bolshevik, internationalist workers party. It’s up to the League for the Fourth International and revolutionary-minded militants everywhere to build it. ■