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<font size=3>Third World Resistance and Western Intellectual
Solidarity<br>
James Petras April 7, 2004<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
'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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The paralysis of the US leftist intellectuals, their inability to express
solidarity with the Iraqi resistance is a disease which afflicts
all<br>
"leftist" intellectuals in the colonial countries. They
are fearful of the problem (the colonial war) and fearful of the
resolution (national<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Will our intellectuals take note? Can they at least circulate a statement
"In Our Name" in solidarity with the iraqui
resistance?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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