Workers Vanguard No. 852	5 August 2005

Down With "War on Terror" Government Repression!

U.S./British Troops Out of Iraq Now!

Criminal Terror Bombings in London

AUGUST 2—The horrific terror bombings of the London subway and bus systems have provided yet another pretext for the capitalist rulers in the U.S. as well as Britain and elsewhere to expand their murderous "war on terror," further curtailing democratic rights. Two weeks after the July 7 bombing, a failed bombing attempt against the London transit system occurred on July 21. Two days later, on July 23, the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheik was hit by bombs, with over 200 wounded and 64 people dead, including many Egyptian workers. Like those who bombed the World Trade Center in 2001 and the Madrid commuter trains in 2004, whoever was responsible for these new atrocities shares the vicious mindset of the imperialist rulers, identifying the working class and the population as a whole with their brutal capitalist rulers.

For the ruling class, such terrorist attacks against civilians provide an opportunity to whip the frightened populace into an anti-terror hysteria in order to vastly expand the state's deadly powers of repression. Particularly since the September 11 attacks, the capitalist rulers have been passing legislation, issuing executive orders and enforcing policing measures that have marked a qualitative diminution in democratic rights. And with every new terror attack, they see an opportunity to squelch more democratic rights. The capitalist rulers want the populace to accept as "normal" what only a few years ago would have been seen as a gross violation of people's rights.

In London, cops have been given shoot-to-kill orders against suspected "terrorists." The meaning of this policy was shown by the brutal killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician. On July 22, plainclothes cops chased and gunned down the young Brazilian immigrant. He had had a recent confrontation with a gang, and horrified eyewitnesses said he looked terrified as he was pushed to the subway floor by the cops. He was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. The police then nearly killed the driver of the train on which Menezes was killed. The driver was tackled by police and a gun put to his head, despite the fact that he was in uniform.

In May 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was seized at a Chicago airport and has since been detained by the government without charge—i.e., disappeared. The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee filed an amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on behalf of Padilla, noting, "Padilla could have been shot to death in the Chicago O'Hare airport, just as well as being taken into custody. Thus the rationale of the 'war against terrorism' is a construct justifying not only the right to disappear citizens, but the right to assassinate them as well." That's exactly what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes. And, indeed, the next day the London cops arrogantly said it could happen again.

In the United States, authorities launched an outrageous assault on already beleaguered New Yorkers. In an unprecedented move, New York City cops are now authorized to "randomly" search commuters' bags and belongings on the city's subway system and suburban mass transit. These measures have nothing to do with stopping terrorism. Their purpose is to get people used to unquestioning obedience to the police and to the wanton violation of their rights. In London, chillingly, an average person may already be recorded on video 300 times daily by the city's more than 650,000 closed-circuit cameras. That and more is what the rulers want to do here.

And the panic and fear they want to spread was on display on the Sunday morning of July 24, when the police held up a whole busload of tourists in NYC's Times Square after a panicky Gray Line supervisor said there were "suspicious" men on the tour. The cops cordoned off the bus, forcing all the tourists to put their hands up and be searched, while five men of South Asian descent were handcuffed and forced to kneel on the sidewalk. The five men turned out to be British citizens on holiday. The torturers of Abner Louima, the killers of Amadou Diallo and Ousmane Zongo, have now been given greater license to go after the population as a whole.

We have repeatedly warned that the repressive measures instituted after September 11, which initially targeted immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, would be directed against black people and the entire labor movement. But the labor bureaucrats have signed on to the government's "war on terror." Most recently, the head of New York City's Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, Roger Toussaint, who was accused of leading a "jihad" during the 2002 contract negotiations, used union funds to hire the former head of security at Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport to train workers in sniffing out potential terrorists. TWU bureaucrats want union workers to act as auxiliaries to the cops, enforcing racist "ethnic profiling" and treating subway riders like the Israeli occupation forces treat the oppressed Palestinian people. TWU members must oppose this reactionary political stunt—what transit workers need to do is fight for their rights, including safe working conditions and transportation service and against the government's repressive measures.

The Bush and Blair administrations are using the London terror attacks to grease the skids for even more repressive laws, many of which have been in the works for some time. In the U.S., the September 11 attack led to the authoritarian, anti-immigrant, deeply sinister USA-Patriot Act. It was supposed to be "temporary," but just a few days ago the U.S. Congress, including by a unanimous vote in the Senate, re-authorized and made permanent nearly all the provisions in the Patriot Act. Congress also recently passed the anti-immigrant "Real ID" Act, a step toward a national identification system. The American Civil Liberties Union recently discovered, as the result of a suit it brought under the Freedom of Information Act, that in the last several years the FBI has collected over a thousand pages of documents about the ACLU itself, and thousands more on antiwar groups such as United for Peace and Justice, as well as civil rights and environmental groups. The frame-up conviction of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart for vigorously defending her client is also an attempt to crush political dissent.

As detainees in the U.S. torture chamber at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba went on hunger strike to expose their desperate plight, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in July upheld the Bush administration's "military commissions," again denying the detainees any right to due process of law (something the Center for Constitutional Rights had fought for and got the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold last year). Now, Vice President Richard Cheney is leading a White House charge to stop legislation barring torture by American forces.

In Britain, which already has some of the most draconian "anti-terror" legislation, the Blair regime is discussing a bill to criminalize speech that could supposedly "indirectly incite" terrorism. Since the London bombings, heavily armed cops have been patrolling the streets and subways, an unusual sight for the city where cops historically did not carry guns. And the racist backlash against Muslims has been growing daily. There have been terrifying and relentless police raids on people's homes, targeting especially Muslims from Somalia and Ethiopia. One home that was raided by the cops was later firebombed after the address was printed in the press, and the fascist British National Front staged a rally in front of a mosque in London's Regents Park. In this atmosphere of racist hysteria, Anthony Walker, a black teenager in Liverpool, was murdered on July 29, an ax embedded in his skull, after being subjected to torrents of racist abuse as he waited at a bus stop with his white girlfriend.

The vicious mindset of the capitalist rulers was captured by Condoleezza Rice, who, following the September 11 attacks, told the National Security Council to think about "how do you capitalize on these opportunities"! The Bush gang, supported by the Democrats, capitalized all right—launching an assault on democratic rights at home, invading Afghanistan and then devastating Iraq, which has been turned into a hellhole where terror attacks claiming dozens of lives have become the daily norm. Working people and all defenders of democratic rights must mobilize in opposition to the government's brutal and racist crackdown at home and imperialist adventures abroad.

We reprint below a July 21 statement issued by the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League, following the London attacks.

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Following Criminal London Terror Bombings:

Down With U.S./British Imperialist Occupation of Iraq!

Defend Muslims Against Labour's Racist Witchhunt!

Within hours of the horrific London bombings that killed over 50 people and injured hundreds, Tony Blair seized on this atrocity as a pretext to escalate the "war on terror." Let's be clear: these bombings were a criminal act of indefensible terror. Like the attack on the World Trade Center and the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid last year, the perpetrators share the same mindset as the imperialist rulers, identifying the working class and the whole population with the policies of the capitalist exploiters and oppressors. The bombs were aimed not at Bush or Blair, who were in Scotland for the G8 summit, but at the multiethnic working people of London: areas such as Edgware Road, which is overwhelmingly Arab; Aldgate, the heart of the Bangladeshi community; Kings Cross and Russell Square, through which hundreds of thousands of ordinary people of every race and ethnicity travel every day.

Bush and Blair, whose savage occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people, self-righteously condemned the terrorists for taking innocent lives. Behind their crocodile tears for those killed and wounded in the London bombings they seek to deflect the justified outrage and sympathy of the population for the victims and their families in order to reinforce their rule at home and abroad. As Guardian journalist Seumas Milne noted, even to link the bombings to Britain's role in Iraq or Afghanistan, which is obvious to millions, can get you denounced as a "traitor"; to question Blair's assertion that the bombings were an attack "on our way of life" is to be branded "an apologist for terror."

For millions around the globe, British imperialism's "way of life" has meant untold terror. Kurds in what is now Iraq, a country manufactured by British imperialism, were bombed from the air while Arabs were shelled by the British colonial overlords in 1919-20. The 1917 Balfour Declaration set the scene for carving the state of Israel out of the homeland of the Palestinians. The bloody partition of India under the Labour government of Clement Attlee ushered in communalist slaughter on an unprecedented scale. This laid the basis for murderous religious and ethnic conflicts that persist to this day, as well as the poverty, destitution and desperation of countless people from the Indian subcontinent to the Near East to Africa.

Millions in this country took to the streets in protest against the impending imperialist slaughter of Iraq in 2003 and Britain's role in the brutal occupation of Iraq cost Blair in the last elections. In that context, London Mayor Ken Livingstone's prominence in the demonstrations protesting the war on Iraq made him an ideal candidate to lead a patriotic "unity" crusade against "terrorism." Addressing the crowd at a 14 July vigil for the victims, flanked by leaders of all the main religions, Livingstone intoned "you see the world gathered in one city, living in harmony, as an example to all." Livingstone's speech could have been written by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who was in the vanguard of this "unity" chorus. Their 7 July statement on the bombings proclaimed: "London is a centre of peace, the most multiracial city in Europe and a global centre of opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan."

This is a shameless and grotesque denial of the reality of life for London's working class and poor, especially immigrants and minorities whose daily grind means long hours and pitiful pay while being routinely vilified by the racist press, the government and police. Since September 11, police dragnets have rounded up more than 600 foreign nationals under "anti-terrorism" legislation, the overwhelming majority of whom were later released. The handful detained, on no charges other than being "terrorist suspects," are confined in Britain's own Guantánamo—Belmarsh prison—or else electronically monitored under "house arrest."

To be Muslim is to be suspect. No sooner had bombs ripped through the Underground than a further wave of racist attacks was unleashed. Muslim organisations received 30,000 hate-filled e-mails; mosques had windows smashed and one was firebombed. In Nottingham a Muslim man, Kamal Raza Butt, was murdered by a gang who shouted "Taliban" before beating him to death. In London, the putative "city of peace," the fascist BNP put out a leaflet with a picture of the bombed bus, declaring that people should now "start listening to the BNP." Muslims fear an even more severe racist backlash now that the police say the bombings were supposedly carried out by British Muslims.

The government is planning more round-ups, more deportations and more sweeping police-state measures. A range of new offences will be created for what are essentially "thought crimes," such as "acts preparatory to terrorism," which might mean visiting "terrorist" Web sites; "indirect incitement," which includes "glorifying the acts of suicide bombers" as well as "attacking the values of the West"! While aimed most immediately at Muslims, the "war on terror" is designed to strengthen the capitalist state's machinery of repression, to be imposed with a vengeance against anyone the government perceives as an opponent as most recently demonstrated by the mass arrests outside the G8 summit. But the ultimate target is the multiethnic working class.

Today, Blair and Livingstone have the audacity to salute the heroism of the Tube workers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and others who put their bodies on the line to help the victims of the bombings. But, for years the government has savaged the living, working and safety conditions for these and other workers. And when the unions have fought back, like the firefighters did on the eve of the Iraq war, they were branded the "enemy within" and threatened with the full force of capitalist state repression. Last summer, Livingstone—the boss of transport workers in the capital—called on London Underground workers to scab on their own strike. And greed for profit and the policies of the government pose the biggest threat to the lives of passengers. The 1987 Kings Cross fire, the 1999 Paddington rail crash and other rail disasters have claimed far more lives than any terrorists. Now, the government is trying to scrap the legislation—introduced after the inferno in Kings Cross took 31 lives—which mandated stricter fire regulations!

For Class Unity of the Multiethnic Working Class!

It is a sign of the times that we have to point out today that London is a class-divided city, not to mention the seat of power of the blood-soaked British ruling class. Despite Britain's industrial decline, the City is still a hub for international capital. Share prices tumbled the day of the bombs, which in its own way shows that the workforce in the Underground and buses has tremendous social power—the City banks and stock exchange are dependent on the transport system. It is this social power that must be brought to bear in a class-struggle fight in defence of immigrants, minorities and the unions themselves against the racist "war on terror." As revolutionary internationalists we took a side in the war, calling for defence of Iraq, without giving any political support to the Saddam Hussein regime. So too must the proletariat be mobilised in defence of the Iraqi peoples against the savage British and U.S. occupation forces through class struggle against the British imperialist rulers at home! All U.S./British troops out of Iraq now! Down with the racist "war on terror"! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations! For trade union/minority mobilisations against fascist terror!

We vehemently oppose the appeals for the "unity" of all classes, which only serves to strengthen the hand of the imperialist rulers by binding the working class and oppressed to their very exploiters and oppressors. Not so the Socialist Party which blatantly appeals to mobilise the proletariat behind the so-called "war on terror," calling on the unions and the Stop the War Coalition to organise a mass protest on the slogan "no to terrorism, no to war." This dovetails with the politics of "antiwar" Labour MPs [Members of Parliament] like Alice Mahon who opposes Blair's invasion of Iraq, from the standpoint that it is not in the best interests of British imperialism at present, while arguing that it's a diversion from the "war on terror" at home.

As Marxists we oppose terrorism as a strategy, even when it derives from real, if misguided, anti-imperialist impulses and targets genuine institutions of state repression—which the London bombing clearly did not. Substituting individual acts against the symbols of imperialist exploitation and oppression is directly counterposed to the task of mobilising the working class for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. But the Socialist Party's declared opposition to "terrorism" is nothing more than an appeal to mobilise the proletariat behind the government's "war on terror." Placing an equals sign between the imperialist powers and the Islamic terrorists, the Socialist Party is in fact capitulating to British and U.S. imperialism, who constitute the mightiest and most dangerous terrorist forces on this planet. This is not particularly surprising coming from an organisation which prides itself on not calling for British troops out of Northern Ireland now—a call which is the most elementary act of opposition to British imperialism.

Class independence of the working class is the precondition for any genuine socialist opposition to imperialism—both against imperialist war and attacks on the working class and minorities at home. But the whole premise of the SWP-built antiwar protests is based on peddling another version of "national unity"—between the working class and oppressed who oppose the occupation of Iraq, and a more "rational" wing of the ruling class that believes British imperialism's interests are being damaged by acting simply as a "pillion passenger" behind the Bush White House. For the reformist SWP, the solution lies not in the overthrow of capitalism but in persuading the British government to break with Bush. An SWP statement (13 July) argues: "There has to be a dramatic reverse in policy, at home and abroad. Pulling the troops out of Iraq will begin to drain the swamp of bitterness that nurtures terrorism," adding that "the majority of people in the US have turned against Bush's war—we must intensify the pressure on the British government to break from him as well."

It is ludicrous to suggest that Britain can somehow "opt out" of the world system of imperialism, short of workers revolution and the establishment of a workers state that expropriates the capitalist class. It is downright grotesque to blame the alliance with the U.S. for British imperialism's brutality. Although today reduced to a decrepit junior partner of the U.S., when they did have the economic and military clout the British imperialists wrote the book on racist divide-and-rule and ruthless exploitation of their colonial "subjects." The "spirit of the Blitz" in World War II that has been invoked almost daily since the terrorist bombings in London is a persistent Labourite myth that all classes were united behind King and country in a common defence of British "democracy." Far from a war for "democracy," for the British imperialists this was a scramble to protect their imperialist "interests"—among which India was a prized possession. Thus they denied India its right to independence and even caused a famine in Bengal, while the Labour Party played a vital role in whipping up patriotic "unity" at home. And contrary to the main myth propagated about the "democratic" allies, it was the Soviet Red Army that smashed Hitler's fascism, at a cost of well over 20 million Soviet citizens' lives.

Moreover, the British imperialists hardly need any lessons from the Americans on police-state repression, having inflicted it for many years on the oppressed Catholics in Northern Ireland. Similar to today's anti-Muslim hysteria, "anti-terrorism" campaigns of the 1970s led to outrageous frame-ups of innocent people such as the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four, who were wrongly convicted in a wave of anti-Irish hysteria following civilian bombing atrocities in British city centres.

Imperialist Hypocrisy and Islamic Fundamentalism

The British press is in a lather about the fact that this "democratic" country could produce "home grown" Islamic terrorists. Ken Livingstone stated the obvious when he said: "I suspect the real problem was that we funded these people as long as they were killing Russians. We gave no thought to the fact that when they stopped killing Russians they might start killing us" (Daily Telegraph, 20 July). For "we," read the British imperialists who, together with the U.S. and the Pakistan authorities, pulled off the largest covert operation in the CIA's history throughout the 1980s to boost the most extreme Islamic reactionaries, including Bin Laden, for a jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. The SWP, the Socialist Party and most of the so-called socialist left were in the camp of the imperialists against the USSR. We hailed the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, noting that this was a progressive act by the Stalinist bureaucracy that offered the possibility of extending the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution to the Afghan peoples, particularly to the hideously oppressed women. Following counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, when imperialist funding to the Islamists dried up, the latter turned on their erstwhile backers, most dramatically in the criminal attack on the World Trade Center. Counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union gave an enormous boost to the forces of religious reaction around the globe, while also leading to a "one superpower world" in which U.S. imperialism and its allies feel they have free rein to ravage the semicolonial world.

The perpetrators of acts such as the London bombing, whoever they may be, demonstrate the mindset typical of religious zealots who believe they have a God-given right to exterminate all non-believers. Islam has no monopoly on this outlook: it parallels that of Christian fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics in the U.S.; the Protestant bigots who justify "ethnic cleansing" against Catholics in Northern Ireland; and the Zionists who seek to "cleanse" the Palestinians from what they deem to be the Jewish "holy land." Terrorist attacks in the name of nationalist or religious forces tend to be aimed at the indiscriminate slaughter of as many of the ordinary, multiethnic working-class people as possible. It is unlikely you would find the remotest representative of the upper classes of this country on the London Underground or buses. Moreover, two of the bombings were in heavily Muslim areas. So whoever perpetrated these attacks, the message can only be that Muslims should go back to their "own" countries.

In Britain Islamic fundamentalism has grown, nurtured by international factors as well as the prevalence of Islamophobia and economic decline. In 2001, Asian youth in Oldham, Bradford and Leeds had to fight pitched battles to defend their homes from fascists who, backed by the police, laid siege to neighbourhoods. In these former textile towns, the factories once provided a degree of racial integration, but economic decline and factory closures has increased the polarisation between rich and poor and led to a level of racial segregation which has been compared to the American South before the civil rights movement.

For the imperialist rulers "Islamic terrorism" has become the surrogate for the war against "Godless communism," the new enemy against which they seek to rally the population in support of imperialist terror abroad and increased state repression at home. Our purpose is to fight to infuse the working class with the consciousness that it has the class interests and the social power to eradicate the system of capitalist imperialism. The 1984-85 British miners strike, among whose most stalwart supporters were blacks and Asians, gave a palpable sense of how class struggle can unite all of the oppressed behind the power of the proletariat. We seek to forge a multiethnic revolutionary workers party which can take this power forward to victory through proletarian socialist revolution which alone can lay the material basis for ending racism, oppression, exploitation and war.