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by Christopher Hitchens
The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington
Are they really “anti-war”?
Saturday’s demonstration in Washington, in favor of immediate withdrawal
of coalition forces from Iraq, was the product of an opportunistic
alliance between two other very disparate “coalitions.” Here is how The
New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them
reading “Speaking Up Against War” and one of
them reading “Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities”) described
the two constituenciess of the event:
The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.
The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose
that it is possible that he has never before come across “International
ANSWER,” the group run by the “Worker’s World” party and fronted by
Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan
Milosevic, and the “resistance” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark
himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires
in Rwanda. Quite a “wide range of progressive political objectives” indeed, if that’s the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any
database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and
well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper – to mention only two
radical left journalists – who have exposed “International ANSWER” as a
front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and
jihadism.
The group self-lovingly calling itself “United for Peace and Justice” is
by no means “narrow” in its “antiwar focus” but rather represents a very
extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable
and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring
credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss “peace” in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who
knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that
the Worker’s World Party – Ramsey Clark’s core outfit – is the product of
a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt
that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian
invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that
depraved rump. If the “United for Peace and Justice” lot want to sink
their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration,
then they invite some principled political criticism on their own
account. And those who just tag along…well, they just tag along.
To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent
support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to
the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is
really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of
liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war,
but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”?
Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish
self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make
me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and
when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who
blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists,
proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical
diatribes against Jews and Hindus.
Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right
out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others
prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy
way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to
criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds
before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were
invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might
think that such an accusation – these thugs were cloned by the American
empire for God's sake – would lead to instant condemnation. But if you
thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)
The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the
Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent
or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite
often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The “fish in the
water” is an old trope, borrowed from Mao’s hoary theory of guerrilla
warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore
over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above
the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of
the “water” or “swamp” is always the same: American support for Israel.
Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike,
presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that
was Saddam’s Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized
murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only
a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning
and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on
the World Trade Center – well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is
it mosquitoes, come home to roost?
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