The white Left in the West is a notoriously unreliable and, by and large, useless force against imperialism. Vietnamese and Palestinian revolutionaries have consistently criticized the impotence and idealism of those who play at revolution in the imperialist metropole but in the grand scheme of things offer no material threat to the forces that are actually destroying millions of people all over the world. Hear Leila Khaled after a meeting with some of these “revolutionaries”:

The training schedule was exacting, but occasionally left us time for a little fun. We were ‘entertaining’ a group of foreign students and trying to lead a Bedouin kind of life in order to politicize our Bedouin population. The students had been attending an international solidarity meeting in Amman held under the auspices of the General union of Palestinian Students. Most were graduates of the 1968 university upheavals in the West. We found it very amusing that they honestly believed they were making a ‘revolution’ if they undressed in public, seized a university building, or shouted an obscenity at bureaucrats. I was initially opposed and refused to talk to them, even though some believed in violent revolution, because I didn’t want to be another experimental ‘guinea-pig’ to Westerners. I finally relented and I am glad I did. I hadn’t met Western ‘revolutionaries’ before. It turned out they represented an unfamiliar cultural rather than a political phenomenon. Some seemed to have read the history political literature of the left, but most regarded the Marxist-Leninist leaders disdainfully, with the exception of the ‘Young Marx,’ who held some sort of fascination for revolution. Some Americans were quite serious and believed in the historic mission of the working class and were making plants to integrate themselves with the masses. What astonished us most about this group was that they were opposed to nationalism, a doctrine we hold dearly as a colonized and dissipated people. Some believed in violence for ‘the hell of it’ and in students as revolutionary agents of history. But the majority were inclined towards guerrilla theatre as a means of ‘making revolution.’ They performed a little for us. As they were departing I was rather struck by a French anarchist student who proclaimed ‘Let chaos reign’ and by a German who echoed the same sentiment. I exclaimed that the Palestinian people were an example of a society in chaos without authority and leadership, which as a result, was left at the mercy of the Zionist oppressor. I asked them what could they prescribe for us in order to overcome our kind of alienation’ — beards, long hair, and toy guns? They merely paused, they smiled, they reflected, they inhaled and passed their joints on in universal wonder.”

So, it’s no wonder that the progressive circles and the “Left” has finally decided to get off its well fed ass after either holding its hands on or outright calling for the destruction of Libya. CNN and other bourgeois press has taken note of the fact that Black people are being sold as slaves in Libya, a country still in chaos after an imperialist intervention into an imperialist promoted civil war that left thousands dead and resulted in the lynching of the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. I’m not by any means a fan of Gaddafi’s ideology, I’ve read the Green Book and it reminds me a lot of Niyazov (former leader of Turkmenistan) and his Ruhamma. Metaphysics for days along with outright misogyny and racism (Gaddafi said that Black people were bound to take over the world since we live where it’s hot and aren’t bound by “work” like people in the West are!) and draws lines of demarcation between “men’s work” and “women’s work”. Gaddafi was also a firm anti-communist, as a matter of fact there was an attempted “Cultural Revolution” in Libya where Communist books were burned. Gaddafi was a shit ideologue and a shit theorist, if his ramblings could even be called “theory”, but the concrete fact of the matter is that his people enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent and he provided material and moral aid to revolutionary movements ranging from the CPP-NPA forces in the Philippines to the MK in South Africa to the Provisional IRA in occupied Ireland. This was an objectively good thing.

There is never, ever any just rationale to back imperialist states bombing foreign cities or killing leaders in other countries. Our task as proletarian revolutionaries, aka Maoists, in the West is to first and foremost work for the destruction of our own countries. This is how we help the people of the world. US intervention leads to slavery. If the Western Left had its way, 10 year old girls would be for sale in Damascus as we speak and people would be having their heads chopped off by ISIS in the cradle of civilization. Thankfully, Assad was able to correctly and pragmatically apply military force to prevent his country from being destroyed by foreigners and terrorists. Gaddafi was not so lucky, and now his country is a fractured and destroyed one. Saddam Hussein was hanged after the US had no further use for him. US imperialism is the number one enemy of the world and its peoples. Russian and Chinese imperialism have their own interests in Syria and other countries, of course, and revisionists are fooling themselves by trying to attribute a “progressive, socialist” character to Chinese meddling and building tofu roads in Africa or Russian machinations in the Middle East, but Assad had the right to engage with them to prevent the collapse of his country. When you do politics, and there are people running around your country blowing up shit and killing your citizens who have entrusted you to do a job, which is secure them, you don’t have time for idealistic bloviating.

Why was Libya destroyed? Because Gaddafi had been a thorn in the side of the US and Europe for years. Reagan bombed his home and killed his daughter for fuck’s sake. They loathed this man because he was a “sponsor of terrorism” (read: backer of revolutionary movements) and was not about to let them meddle in the affairs of his country without a fight. This is the same reason they work to destabilize Venezuela, Syria, the DPRK and other countries. They do this in many ways. Sometimes they do this by cynically taking advantage of progressive national liberation struggles to their own benefit, such as that of the Kurdish people who established an autonomous zone in Rojava. Right opportunist elements within the PYD promoted open alliance with US imperialism, allowing the building of US airbases, embedding of US troops, and welcoming cruise missile strikes all under the pretext of “fighting ISIS”. ISIS is a creation of the US and its previous interventions in the Middle East, the real reason for setting up in Syria was to directly have a hand in toppling the Syrian government.

Sometimes they directly intervene, such as in Libya, where they armed “rebels” (read: the same people that are selling Black people) and provided support for them through missile strikes and bombings and spy satellites that provide intelligence to enemies of the state. Sometimes they stir up coups like in Chile or Guatemala. Sometimes they send thousands of soldiers like Iraq or Vietnam. Sometimes they try to strangle you with sanctions like Cuba and Venezuela. The point is, US imperialism is a wicked beast with several nefarious weapons in its arsenal and is willing to use them all to destroy any country that dares to raise a fist against it. Our task is to unite all that can be united with on an anti-imperialist basis, rooted firmly in the dialectical materialist, Maoist understanding that imperialism rots best from within. Internal contradictions are the basis of change. A building or an imperialist empire is undermined and destroyed best from within, and we are within the most evil empire on the face of the Earth. To stop slavery in Libya requires more than idealistic phrasemongering. There were people who actually thought that toppling Assad and installing a terrorist puppet regime would actually be a good idea, or who can only bawl “Back the Kurds” and ignoring the actual material realities of the rest of Syria and the Middle East. These people also, hilariously, call themselves Communists.

There were even “Communists” that somehow thought that there was a possibility that all revolutionary forces would regroup in Rojava and subsequently, somehow, wage a protracted people’s war against Assad, Russia, the US, and Turkey. Quite. They also ignore the fact that black people are being lynched in Venezuela because their particular flavor of ideology isn’t hegemonic there for a myriad of reasons. This is another disservice. They are silent on shit that actually matters and choose instead to follow the activities of small groups and various factions that align with their own ideological interests. When said small groups do not exist or are rejected by the masses, they simply ignore conflicts and fail in their proletarian internationalist duty. You cannot simply just remain neutral or say that there are “no revolutionary forces” and allow “chaos to reign”. If you do, you’re an accomplice in US imperialism and owe a blood debt to the people of the world. Your idealism and behaving as if US imperialism is not an actual material threat (but still a paper tiger) is why there is slavery in Libya. Be with the people of the world and learn from them.