The morality of occupation and the irony of history.

So apparently it's 49 years since the Iraqi revolution that founded some basic rights and whatnot for Iraq. Interestingly, it's been championed by al-Talabani and a statue of one of the leaders of the revolution has been erected. Ironic how the burgeoise manages to get things half right.

The reports keep pouring in about the things that are done in Iraq. Even a cursory glance at the conflict is heart-rending. The numbers of casualties and injured are beyond a million, the torture, the prisons, the state of emergency are all known, the Bush regime is not even trying to cover it up anymore. The game right now is to break Iraq apart and to stop a united liberation front.

There are some good news from Iraq, of course. The secular and socialist resistance groups that have been noted here and there, the oil union strike, the movement of the Iraqi labour in general against the occupation (perhaps together with their CP eventually?). I am not going to moralize about the resistance in general however. Whatever needs to be done must be done. Every dead occupant is a victory for the resistance. A resistance that allows the Bolivarian revolution the space to develop, a resistance that is the first bulwark against an insane assault against Iran, a resistance that is the focus point of modern liberation struggles.

There is only one thing that is truly disheartening about the rising death toll of the occupants. That their officers and their leaders aren't the ones littering the streets or getting blown to pieces inside their APC's. Instead, poor people from across the land of the brave are killed in back alleys of Kirkuk and the streets of Baghdad.

War has everything to do with morality. With what happens to people who torture, and are told that they should torture. About what happens to those who are forced to watch what little they have be destroyed, their friends and family murdered, the arbitrary arrests, the lies, the destruction of the lives they lead, the stories they are told about themselves and the world. Yet, what is more of a moral stance than to resist?

49 years ago was a revolution of some kind, then. Now the oppressors are back, some who speak with the same British accents as they did then. The Yankees, however, are proving more than capable heirs to the imperialist throne they ascended after Britain slipped back into a second-rate welfare state with it's ruling class faded dreams of imperialist glory. Morality, if it can ever be understood, cannot be anything but the ordinary Iraqi who is one day fed up - not because of Islam, or because of a Ba'ath party membership, or because he hates our freedom - but because he cannot abide his situation anymore and grabs his kalashnikov or a bomb belt, and starts to resist. Like the unknown thousands, millions, billions who have throughout the ages fought, bled, died and celebrated in their struggles against patricians, knights, lords, imperialists, vice roys, capitalists and others from the upper class they remain entitled to our respect.

I am writing about the 73rd anniversary celebrations of the Iraqi Communist Party for a few reasons: first of all, because we are in need of another image of the Iraqi occupation and resistance. It is not exclusively religious, perhaps not even predominantly. The idea that the whole thing is about Sunni/Shia conflict to the point of exclusion is just another Clash of Civilizations lie. Certainly, it has it's importance, but it is not the end-all, be-all of Iraqi resistance and struggle.

Furthermore, the ICP is both a hope and something of a quisling. To take part in the imperialist government and not be fighting the occupants is a terrible mistake. Certainly, they always hated Saddam, but building a mass movement of liberation during imperialist occupation isn't done through collaberation.

Lastly, I myself visited the ICP 73rd anniversary as celebrated here in Lund. It was an interesting experience, if nothing else. For all it's problems, the ICP must remain a group we on some level support, even if we wish they built a secular liberation front rather than sit in the cabinet.

Resistance in Center and Periphery

I just read a newspaper article about Somalia: another crisis that sends the tremor of imperialism out from it's center of Baghdad into the Horn of Africa. I was about to write about both the hubris of the American ruling class and their constant inability to retain and administer their frequent, if bloody, victories. I was also going to write about my own fears that the violence in especially Iraq, but also beyond that, is as much engineered and directed as unforeseen. That perhaps it is just more divide-and-conquer tactics that so many colonial groups have attempted before. But then, I saw something else that caught my eye.

Lenin's Tomb presents an incredibly interesting piece on Egypt and what is occurring there. A nation that still retains it's socialist legacy. I must share lenin's enthusiasm for what could occur: a victory against the egyptian upper class could change the hegemony of resistance in the Middle East. Indeed, it could be one of the first outbreaks of the newer socialist movements on another continent than it's home in Latin America and the Caribbean (not counting the Oaxaca soviet: the first surge of popular resistance that was not Zapatista, but not the last).

If anyone has more information on the Egyptian situation, I would be more than grateful for that.

End the occupation!

So the day after my self-avowed journey into philosophy I am going to make a post about contemporary politics again. This weekend marks the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq: a war that was opposed globally and nationally in the united states. Back then, liberal columnists raved and ranted in favour of the invasion together with the current minister of the exterior in Sweden, Carl Bildt. Now, four years later, there is even less democracy than it was when Saddam was at the helm. 650 000 people have died and that number is rising daily. Of the occupants there are about 2500 American troops and a few hundred of the 'coalition of the willing'. The imperialist debacle has spread across the world, rising Orwellian laws in it's wake.

It is time to end the occupation: there can only be democracy, freedom and justice in Iraq if the Iraqi people do it themselves: from the grassroots. The US out of Iraq, end the occupation! Demonstrate in Malmö at 11.00 or wherever the closest demo might be held.