[News] Petras: Third World Resistance and Western Intellectual Solidarity

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Third World Resistance and Western Intellectual Solidarity
James Petras   April 7, 2004

Falluja, Baghdad, Ramadi, Nasiriya - an entire people has risen to confront 
the colonial occupation army, its mercenaries, clients, and collaborators. 
First in massive peaceful protests, they were massacred by US, British, 
Spanish and Polish troops: Bare hands against tanks and machineguns.  The 
armed resistance, in the beginning a minority now indisputably the most 
popular force, backed by millions.  The colonial armies, fearful of every 
Iraqi, shoot wildly into crowds and retreat; they encircle whole cities, 
fire missiles into crowded working class neighborhoods, helicopters pour 
machine gun fire into homes, factories, mosques.  In the eyes of the 
colonial soldiers,  the enemy is everywhere.  For once they are right.  The 
resistance resists, every block, every house, every store rings out with 
gunfire, the resistance is everywhere.  Every house takes hits, the 
resistance fight on.  The people aid the wounded fighters, wash their 
wounds.  They provide water to the thirsty to quench their parched throats 
and cool their hands - the automatic weapons are hot.

And where are the western mercenaries?  The $1,000 dollar a day hired guns 
with their flak vests, dark glasses, --their swagger and insolence have 
disappeared.  They too have seen the charred bodies of their ex-partners of 
death.

Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed, thousands have been injured, many more 
will die but after each funeral tens of thousands more, the peaceful, 
apolitical, "wait and see" ones have taken up the gun.

'It's a civil war', brays the bourgeois press.  This is wishful thinking. 
Shia and Sunni are in this together, brothers and sisters (yes, women 
street fighters) in arms, each covering their comrades' backs as they 
confront the tanks.  And the resistance is winning.  Never mind the 
"proportions" - five or ten or twenty Iraqis for each colonial 
soldier.  The Iraqi Resistance has won politically:  No appointed official 
has any future : They exist as long as the US military remains but they 
will flee from the rooftops of their bunkers as the US withdraws.

Militarily, the US and the mercenaries are taking thousands of casualties - 
scores of deaths and wounded everyday.  In Washington, the civilian 
militarists, the architects of the destruction of Iraq are 
panicking.  "Send more troops!" say Rumsfeld,  Wolfowitz, and the would-be 
president Kerry.

 From his Texas ranch, Bush proclaims the resistance leader Moqtada Sadr a 
"killer".  Far from the fire, the mayhem, the massacres, his television 
doesn't show the child with the mangled face.  Bush once again is far from 
the killing fields - Vietnam and now Iraq.  Now he can claim a draft 
deferment - he is nominally the President who unilaterally declared the end 
of the war in May 2003.  Now, April 2004 there are more than 600 dead US 
soldiers as the Iraqi resistance rose to meet Bush's challenge "Bring them 
on" and took the streets from the colonial army, then they came on and 
conquered the cities and with sheer courage and absolute determination they 
hold their ground.

The "Arabs" resist, while the overstuffed cabbage Sharon is silent.  His 
once loquacious agents, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and their underlings are 
strangely silent.  Are they worried that there might be a mass backlash 
against those who cooked the data to get the US into a war in which 
thousands of US soldiers will die and be maimed - in order to "protect" 
Israel's undisputed claim to dominance in the Middle East?

In the early spring of 2004, in April to be exact, the dreams of a new 
colonial empire came crashing down on the masterminds of the New World 
Order, an undisputed, unilateral Empire.  The end of the 
Sharon-Wolfowitz-Blair-Chaney  "Greater Mid-East Co-Prosperity 
Sphere".  The Iraqi resistance has turned the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz dream of a 
series of wars against Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea into a nightmare 
of bloody street battles on every block in Falluja and Sadr City, Baghdad.

The heroism, the valor, the inspiration, the mass resistance is all the 
more so as the Iraqi people draw on their resources, their own solidarity, 
their own history, their belief that they will be free or take down every 
colonial soldier as they fight to the death.  The phrase "Patria o Muerte" 
takes on a special and very specific meaning in Iraq:  It is not a slogan 
of a leader, a vanguard, to arouse and inspire the people - it is the 
living practice of a whole people.  Patria or Muerte comes out of the 
mouths of teenage street fighters as well as street venders and widows 
with  black scarves.  The "Iraqi April Days" are a lesson to for the whole 
Third World and other would-be imperial colonialists:  Mass armed 
resistance cannot be politically or militarily defeated.  The heroism of 
the  Iraqi resistance stands in stark contrast to the cowardly self-styled 
Arab leaders: The Jordanian and Saudi monarchs, the garrulous corrupt 
"President for Life" Mubarak, the Iranian Ayatollah collaborators.  Not one 
has moved a finger to aid the Iraqi national liberation struggle.  They 
fear the example of the successful Iraqi resistance will light a fire under 
their ample buttocks.

And the Western intellectuals?  Since the resistance began a year ago.not a 
single US intellectual, of the dozens of progressive, critical thinkers 
("Not in My Name") has dared to declare their solidarity with the 
anti-colonial struggle.  They have "problems", I hear, "about supporting 
Arab fundamentalists, terrorists, anti-Semites etc."  Echoes of the French 
intellectuals who also opposed the popular armed resistance movements 
against the Nazis because the "Communists had taken over." or later because 
the 'colons' in Algeria also had a "right to be in Algeria" (Albert Camus). 
In his book "Listen Yankee", C. Wright Mills challenged US 'progressives' 
who balked at supporting the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960's.  "This 
is a real blood and guts popular revolution", he said.  "You can make a 
difference, you can be part of the solution or part of the problem."

The Western intellectuals are a problem.  They are not ordering the troops, 
even less are they (or their children or grandchildren) pulling the 
triggers murdering Iraqi school kids.  They are sitting on their 
hands.  "But", they protest, "we oppose the war" while they scramble to 
endorse candidate Kerry who does support the war and even calls for 40,000 
more troops to pour missiles into crowded neighborhoods., under U .N 
auspices to be sure.   So where are the Western intellectuals in these days 
when the Iraqi people have risen arms in hand to resist the US military 
juggernaut?  There are two sides:  An entire nation fighting a colonial 
occupation army and US imperialism.  Serious and consequential political 
intellectuals must make a choice:  To refuse to take sides is tantamount to 
complicity, intellectual complacency is a luxury for intellectuals in the 
empire which doesn't exist in Iraq.  Over 1000 Iraqi intellectuals and 
professors have been murdered during the occupation.  The issues are not 
obscure or complex.  One side demands free elections, a free press, and 
self-determination while the other, the colonial officials, ban newspapers, 
appoint puppet rulers and murder their opponents.

The paralysis of the US leftist intellectuals, their inability to express 
solidarity with the Iraqi resistance is a disease which afflicts all
"leftist" intellectuals in the colonial countries.  They are fearful of the 
problem (the colonial war) and fearful of the resolution (national
liberation).  In the end, the comforts and freedoms they enjoy, the 
university applause and adulation they receive in the colonial motherland 
weighs more heavily than the mental costs of a straightforward declaration 
of support for the revolutionary liberation movements.  They resort to 
phony "moral equivalences", against the war and against the 
"fundamentalists", the "terrorists", the 'whoever' who is engaged in their 
own self-emancipation and has not paid sufficient attention to the 
self-appointed guardians of Western Democratic Values.  It is not difficult 
to understand the absence of solidarity with liberation movements among the 
progressive intellectuals in the imperial countries:  they too have been 
colonized, mentally and materially.

Thousands of humble people in Iraq are giving these erudite intellectuals a 
practical lesson in solidarity:on April4,2004 in the midst of hostile tanks 
and helicopter gunships, thousands  marched from Baghdad to Fallujah 
carrying food and medicine to the embattled and encircled people in that 
city which will forever be remembered as the cradle of  emancipation.

Will our intellectuals take note? Can they at least circulate a statement 
"In Our Name" in solidarity with the iraqui resistance?

In the meantime, the mass popular resistance in Iraq takes on the well-fed, 
over-armed armies of occupation in hand to hand warfare.  They do no ask if 
their neighbor, friends or comrades are Sunni, secular, Shia, Baathist or 
Communist, they do not stand aside when a mosque, a school or a housing 
project is bombed or machine-gunned.they have made a commitment to engage 
in the struggle, to join in one national movement to oust the invader, the 
oil thieves, the murderers at hand and afar.  It's a pity, more for 
themselves than for any material contribution they could make to the 
historical struggle that the US progressive intellectuals have chosen to 
abstain and once again demonstrate the irrelevance of the Western 
intellectuals to Third World Liberation.


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