November 18, 2015

In the face of spreading violence and repression, we can't give in to helplessness, writes Danny Katch , author of Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation .

THE MORNING after the deadly attacks in Paris, the Economist took the fact that trains and planes were mostly running on schedule as evidence that the mood among ordinary Parisians was one of "defiant normality."

This idea of Western civilization maintaining a stiff upper lip against the barbarians at the gate has become a cliché of the "war on terror." George W. Bush went so far as to advise the American people to keep shopping after the September 11, 2001, attacks, or the terrorists would win.

Of course, people understandably hope for "normality" in the wake of a crisis. I worked in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when the September 11 attacks took place, and in the days afterward, some of my co-workers were relieved to get back to the routines of daily life--and somewhat thankful, since thousands of our neighbors no longer could.

But the idea that this impulse is somehow a show of defiance--a steely resolve that "the terrorists haven't won"--is nonsense, a condescending pat on the head urging us regular folk to quietly go about our business and let the people in charge handle the situation.

François Hollande and Barack Obama at a celebration of D-Day in France

After all, our rulers treat these situations with the very opposite of normality, defiant or otherwise.

In the days after 9/11, the U.S. ruling class feverishly planned wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded government surveillance programs and pushed through the civil liberties-shredding USA PATRIOT Act. This week, the French government escalated its participation in the U.S.-led war on ISIS, declared a three-month state of emergency and began considering a range of drastic changes to the constitution that will weaken basic democratic rights.

The "normality" we are praised for in these situations is better described as passivity--not mobilizing opposition to our rulers even when it's clear that they are pursuing more of the same violent and oppressive policies that are root causes of terrorism in the first place.

Real defiance was the reaction in Spain after the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed almost 200 people. The conservative government's hope of building support based on "war on terror" fervor was upended by the bitter opposition to Spain joining up with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

That, unfortunately, is a historical rarity--aided by the fact that the Spanish government initially tried to falsely pin the blame for the attacks on Basque separatists. More often, people respond to being bombed by focusing their primary anger on those doing the bombing.

And that response is something the political establishment, across the mainstream spectrum, relies on to maintain its power.

ON MONDAY, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that while Paris would go ahead and host a UN climate summit planned for late November and early December--to do otherwise, he said, would be to "abdicate to the terrorists"--demonstrations outside the summit "will not take place."

In other words, the French government is hoping to ban political protest. It would never dare to do so unless it could use the terrorist attacks as a pretext, and count on popular support whipped up in the "war on terror" frenzy.

The demonstrations planned for the COP 21 summit have been months in the making and were expected to draw as many as 200,000 people. Activists see them as a crucial part of the movement to halt climate change--a far more existential threat to humanity than even the worst act of terrorism--so it is heartening that most organizations are still planning to go ahead with the mobilizations.

France, of course, doesn't have the hypocrisy market cornered. In the U.S., journalist Judith Miller--whose parroting of Bush administrations lies about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction in the New York Times helped to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq--had the nerve after the Paris attacks to tweet that American college students should stop protesting and see where the real danger lies.

The U.S. government and its allies stomp from one war to another--and yes, drone strikes are a form of war even if Americans aren't being killed--and back again, ignoring the fact that the latest war always seems to be against enemies created in the previous one. The forerunner of ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq, didn't exist until after the U.S. invaded in 2003, and ISIS itself only thrived because of the sectarian civil war unleashed by the American occupation.

Now, France plans to imprison more Muslims in order to fight terrorism, ignoring the fact that being in jail was a part of the so-called "radicalization" process for the perpetrators of, for example, the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris earlier this year.

But consequences aren't something that the ruling classes generally think about--because they are used to making other people pay the price--like for the banks deemed too big to fail.

In 2003, United for Peace and Justice made stickers that read, "Bush lied, they died." In 2008, Occupy Wall Street chanted, "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out." Today in France, the New Anti-capitalist Party says, "Their wars. Our dead."

IT'S NOT enough for those of us who opposed the U.S. wars in the Middle East to pat ourselves on the back for being right. We were participants in one of the biggest antiwar movements in history in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, and a decade later, it is all but nonexistent.

To rebuild a movement strong enough to hold our rulers accountable, we need to hold ourselves accountable and learn from our mistakes.

The movement that put millions of people in the streets around the world on February 15, 2003, one month before the invasion took place, was incredibly broad, but also shallow. Many protesters viewed George W. Bush and the Iraq invasion as exceptions to a generally benevolent U.S. tradition of "global leadership." The veteran activists who knew better failed to educate enough people otherwise. As a result, most opponents of war in this era protested war in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan. They opposed Republican bombs more than Democratic ones, and they were often silent about Palestine.

The antiwar movement succeeded in showing that the Iraq War was about oil and making it harder for the Pentagon to contemplate future invasions. But it failed to adapt to a Democratic president (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) who opposed the invasion of Iraq on tactical grounds, but was just as committed to the project of American domination around the world--and proved it by escalating the war on Afghanistan.

The collapse of that antiwar movement was one in a series of defeats for popular forces associated with peace and justice. Within a few years, the impressive Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation--which at one point threatened to unite Sunni and Shias against the American occupiers--was destroyed by the sectarian civil war.

In early 2011, the wave of revolts known as the Arab Spring swept across North Africa and the Middle East, shaking the foundations of decades-old tyrannies and even toppling several of the U.S.-backed tyrants.

But four years later, the counterrevolution has gained the upper hand. The people of Syria in particular caught between two deadly enemies--the ISIS militias on one side, and the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad on the other. And looming behind them are regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, and imperial powers Russia and the U.S.

The balance of terror--with the U.S. government, accurately described by Martin Luther King as "greatest purveyor of violence in the world," at its summit--has been restored at the horrific cost of more carnage than ever, carried out in many forms.

There's no vindication in the fact that the left's newspapers and media outlets predicted that wars supposedly against terrorism would produce more terrorism--because we haven't grown strong enough to stop the deadly cycle.

It's critical that we not give in to cynicism and helplessness, but instead rebuild the struggle for justice and for peace on a stronger political basis. Hopefully, that can begin on the streets of Paris outside the UN climate summit, in defiance of the government's threatened bans. If not, it will have to begin somewhere else.

What is most important is that we not continue on the disastrous path that our rulers want to make the new normal.