Road to anti-war unity
By
Fred Goldstein
Published Oct 27, 2005 10:40 PM
The most important task of the anti-war
movement in this country is to build a united front with the workers and oppressed peoples of the United States. The movement must address national oppression
and class exploitation in a serious way if it is to become an effective weapon
in the struggle against imperialism, and not restrict itself to being a mere
protest movement that assembles periodically.
The working class’s
problems are mounting on every front: from union busting to health-care
cutbacks, pension takebacks, wage cuts, unemployment, declining safety on the
job, massive super-exploitation of immigrant workers, cutbacks in education and
day care, lack of affordable housing, the gender gap in wages, racism in hiring,
etc. Fighting the attacks on the working class must be an integral part of the
anti-war movement if it is to represent and mobilize the decisive sectors that
can actually stop the war—the working class and the oppressed people of
this country.
But in its attention to the class struggle and as a special
and decisive part of the struggle against imperialism, the anti-war movement
must pay the closest attention to the question of national oppression in this
country. It is particularly important at the moment for the movement to reach
out and forge unity around New Orleans and the struggle for the right of return,
reconstruction and reparations.
This is the cutting-edge issue of the
Black liberation movement today. It must be supported by all progressive and
revolutionary forces, not just in word but in deed.
It is an axiom of
Marxist class politics that the ruling class’s foreign policy is a direct
extension of its domestic policy. Put simply, this means that their wars abroad
are a continuation of their war at home—the war to enforce exploitation
and oppression.
Rarely has this connection been symbolized so dramatically
as in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Black community
of New Orleans, 350,000 people or more, was overwhelmingly the victim of the
hurricane in that city. And it was victimized primarily through criminal neglect
by all levels of government during the crisis, which caused at least a thousand
deaths and incalculable suffering.
Criminal neglect and
occupation
But added to the suffering resulting from criminal
neglect—being left stranded on roof-tops, in the Superdome, the Con
vention Center and elsewhere for five days —came a brutal military/police
occupation.
The Louisiana National Guard, part of which is serving in
Iraq, was mobilized against the community. The 82nd Air borne, which carried out
atrocities against the Iraqi people in Falluja, was sent into New Orleans.
Heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries—the same group hired by the Pentagon
to guard oil wells and train U.S. troops in Iraq—turned up on the streets
of New Orleans to control the Black population.
Together with the police,
this combined armed force herded people onto buses and forcibly separated
families—children from parents, husbands from wives, relatives from
relatives—in a manner many victims said was reminiscent of the days of
slavery and the auction block.
People were executed on the spot. Over
2,000 were jailed, allegedly for “looting,” often for taking their
only means of survival.
Those 2,000—overwhelmingly Black
males—lanquish in jail today.
The armed force of the racist
capitalist state came to ensure “law and order” in a situation in
which people were starving, dehydrated, sick, injured, worried to death over the
whereabouts of their families and loved ones and had lost everything they
owned.
Deliberate plan to disperse Black community
Through
the command of the National Guard and the regular army, the Pentagon occupiers
of Iraq played a key role in the repression in New Orleans.
It was they
who orchestrated the occupation. It was they who sent recruiters into the
Houston Astrodome to sign up desperate youths for Iraq in the midst of the
disaster.
Most importantly, they helped to execute the planned dispersal
of the Black population of New Orleans to cities across the country. It was part
of a general plan to seize the opportunity presented by the levees breaking and
the consequent flooding to fragment and dissolve the Black community, break up
any cohesion and prevent it from returning to New Orleans as a
community.
This operation in New Orleans was as much a conscious act of
imperialist aggression as the war in Iraq. The political implications for the
anti-war movement are as clear as a bell.
The struggle against the war
abroad can not be separated from the struggle against the war at home. And that
war, in the case of Katrina, was part of a war of oppression against the Black
nation in the same way that the war in Iraq is a war of national oppression
against the Iraqi people.
It is no accident that in 2003 President George
W. Bush appointed Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief under
reactionary Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to train the Iraqi police. Having served as
head of the racist occupation forces in the biggest Black community in the
United States made Kerik eminently qualified to train puppet colonial police for
the Pentagon occupiers.
This is yet another living example of the foreign
policy being an extension of domestic policy.
Also note that Raymond
Kelly, Wall Street’s current New York City police chief, was the director
of the International Police Monitors in Haiti during 1994 and 1995, training the
Haitian police.
If things need to be made any clearer, just look at how
the first contracts doled out for New Orleans went to Vice President Dick
Cheney’s former firm of Halliburton, the U.S. corporate overseer and prime
war contractor in Iraq.
Among Halliburton’s tasks in New Orleans was
to deal with helping the oil industry. Halliburton’s primary but not
exclusive role in Iraq is to oversee the takeover of the Iraqi oil
industry.
The same corporations that pump oil out of the Gulf of Mexico
and refine millions of barrels a day in New Orleans are the ones that backed the
invasion of oil-rich Iraq.
The giant oil companies work hand-in-glove with
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Gens. Abizaid and Casey in Iraq. They are also
a major power in New Orleans, connected to the corporate and banking world
there—and they are ultimately responsible, with the rest of the
region’s industrialists and financiers, for the poverty, racism and
oppression endured by the Black community of New Orleans.
The struggle
against the war in Iraq cannot be separated from the struggle of the Black
liberation movement to reconstitute the Black community in New Orleans and to
exercise the right of self-determination in taking control of the reconstruction
effort to rebuild the city, which was 70 percent Black before Katrina.
The
intimate connection between imperialist war abroad and national oppression at
home, and the absolute necessity to combine the struggle against both, must
become a pillar of the anti-war movement.
Sept. 24: An opportunity
for unity missed
On Sept. 24 perhaps 300,000 people
assembled in Washington under the general demand to “Bring the Troops Home
Now.”
The demonstration was a welcome reawakening of the anti-war
movement in the biggest demonstration since the war began. It was spurred by
media coverage of Cindy Sheehan, who camped out in Crawford, Texas. Yet as
excellent as it was, it cannot escape attention that it was overwhelmingly
white. Leave aside for the moment that the organized working class was in very
limited attendance.
To a certain extent, this is due to historical reasons
and material reasons beyond the control of the organizers. The anti-war movement
of the Vietnam War era, under the guidance of liberals and social democrats, put
up a wall between itself and the African American liberation struggle as well as
the struggle against racism. Major, historic demonstrations—such as the
Moratorium of half a million people—took place while Nixon
administration’s COINTELPRO operations were destroying the Black Panther
Party and other Black liberation organizations.
Ironically, it was
precisely the repeated uprisings of the African American people against racism,
police brutality and poverty, including the simultaneous rebellions in over 100
cities in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that were
a significant factor that frightened the ruling class about continuing the
Vietnam War. Nevertheless, the official anti-war movement turned its back on the
Black rebellions and the resistance in the Black community; a legacy of disunity
was established.
Because today’s movement has been largely white,
and the Sept. 24 demonstration took place in the midst of a massive crisis for
the Black nation, a historic opportunity to take a giant step toward mending
relations presented itself. The organizers could have used four full weeks to
make it known that this demonstration was going to elevate the cause of New
Orleans and come to the aid of Black people in time of need. The Katrina crisis
was the domestic equivalent of Iraq for the hundreds of thousands of African
Ameri cans displaced and dispersed with callous insensitivity and
brutality.
To be sure, a few slogans were added on. A New Orleans speaker
was included in the program. But what was needed was to embrace the struggle of
New Orleans for dear life. The Black leaders fighting for the cause of New
Orleans should have been offered the opportunity to convene and discuss with the
organizers, reshaping the program without sacrificing the struggle against the
war.
What was needed was to develop the most effective methods to use this
massive gathering to forge solidarity and unity in the struggle against the Bush
administration, state and local officials and corporate parasites, who are all
trying to make permanent the destruction of the New Orleans Black
community.
Efforts could have been made to merge the anti-war message with
an explanation of the profound political meaning of this crisis for the African
American community—many of whom regard what was happening as a setback of
historic proportions. It was necessary to explore follow-up solidarity and
support, to be organized and determined by representatives of the Black struggle
taking up the issue.
What was needed was to make an appeal to the hundreds
of thousands gathered for a massive solidarity and support network that would
mobilize all over the country and render aid and assistance to the New Orleans
leadership in getting the dispersed population at least located, possibly
registered, and to funnel the information to the organizers of the effort to
return.
One thing that would have demonstrated solidarity on the spot
would have been to march to an armory near the rally in Washington, D.C. There,
evacuees were being housed. Such a march would have served notice to evacuees
that they were not alone, and served notice on the government that the masses of
the anti-war movement were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the African
American people.
Millions More Movement ignored
Another
failure to show solidarity with African Americans was the organizers’
unwillingness to promote and publicize the Millions More Movement rally that was
coming up on Oct. 15, just three weeks later.
The MMM rally was dedicated
to helping the victims of Katrina. It was to be a unity rally and a gathering of
a broad spectrum of national African American leadership, under the auspices of
and at the invitation of Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of
Islam. As it turned out, more than a million African American people came to the
MMM rally, according to the organizers.
In fact, the MMM rally was very
much an anti-war rally as well as a rally for Katrina victims. Most important,
though, it was a manifestation of the various currents in the leadership of the
Black nation. As such, it was an attempt to take the self-determination of
African American people as an oppressed nation a step forward.
It was an
attempt to bring broader sectors of the African American population into
alliance with Latin@s, Native Americans, poor people in general, with Africa,
Cuba and Venezuela—and to move toward independence from the yoke of the
oppressor nation dominated by the white racist ruling class.
National
oppression and unity
in the movement
The anti-war movement
must recognize that the United States is a prisonhouse of nations.
This
prisonhouse of nations is made up of African Americans, whose ancestors were
kidnapped from Africa and enslaved; of Latin@s, whose land in the southwest was
annexed when the United States stole one-third of Mexico; of the Native Ameri
can population, who were consigned to concentration camps called reservations
after their land was stolen; of Chinese people, whose ancestors were brought
here as indentured servants to build the railroads. It is populated by more and
more immigrant nationalities from the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America,
people who come here because U.S. imperialist corporations have taken over their
coun tries and they cannot survive at home.
These nationalities make up
the oppressed sectors of the population and the multinational working class.
They are at one and the same time the most exploited parts of the population and
potentially the most militant, dynamic force in the struggle against imperialist
war and exploitation.
But the centuries of racism by the ruling class
works to break up the unity of our class. The only way to forge that unity is
for every organization that is based in the dominant white oppressor nation to
demonstrate its independence from the racist ruling class by recognizing the
right of self determination of the oppressed and extending every measure of
solidarity possible in word and in deed.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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