Zimmerwald, WWII and the UN

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect:

"Whatever the outcome of the war, America has embarked upon a
career of imperialism, both in world affairs and in every other aspect
of her life...Even though, by our aid, England should emerge from this
struggle without defeat, she will be so impoverished economically and
crippled in prestige that it is improbable she will be able to resume or
maintain the dominant position in world affairs which she has
occupied so long. At best, England will become a junior partner in a
new Anglo-Saxon imperialism, in which the economic resources and
the military and naval strength of the United States will be the center
of gravity. Southward in our hemisphere and westward in the Pacific
the path of empire takes its way, and in modern terms of economic
power as well as political prestige, the sceptre passes to the United
States. All this is what lies beneath the phrase 'national defense'--some
of it deeply hidden, some of it very near the surface and soon to
emerge to challenge us."

(From a speech by Virgil Jordan, president of the National Industrial
Conference Board, to the Convention of the Investment Bankers
Association, Dec. 10, 1940)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORLD WAR ONE AND ZIMMERWALD
Karl Marx and other socialists formed the first Socialist International
in 1864. Rivalry between Marxists and anarchist supporters of the
Russian Mikhail Bakunin caused it to collapse.

Engels and a newer generation of Marxists founded the Second
Socialist International in 1889. Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue told
the assembled delegates that their flag was "the red flag of the
international proletariat." Also, they were coming together as
"brothers with a single common enemy...private capital, whether it be
Prussian, French, or Chinese."

In Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28 1914, Serb nationalists assassinated
the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand. On July 28, Austria declared war
on Serbia and the war became generalized within a few short months.

On August 4 1914, while Russian troops prepared for an assault into
East Prussia, German armies invaded Belgium and swept toward
France. That day, August 4, was also the day that socialist members of
the French and German parliaments voted to support emergency war
appropriations. These socialists became known as 'defensists'. The
wanted to postpone socialism until their own armies had successfully
defended their own nation against the "barbarians" of the opposing
nation. In reality, the socialist labor leaders and parliamentarians had
become completely "bourgeoisified". They failed to defend the interests
of the working-class against the nationalist fury whipped up by the
warmakers in each nation.

The capitulation to war-fever threw social democracy into a crisis.
Antiwar socialists held a number of meetings in Switzerland by in
order to develop a strategy. Zimmerwald, a small rustic town, became
the center of the antiwar opposition.

The antiwar opposition split into two camps. One camp was "centrist".
It opposed the war but advanced a strategy that was not revolutionary.
It sought to mobilize public pressure in the various warring countries
in order to force an early peace. The leader of this grouping was
Robert Grimm, a Swiss socialist.

Vladimir Lenin led the Zimmerwald left. It advocated a "defeatist"
policy of revolution and civil war inside each warring country. Other
socialists, including Trotsky, considered Lenin extreme at first, but
events conspired to make Lenin look reasonable. Germany pushed into
France and the armies of the two nations fought along the Meuse River
over a 6-month period in 1916, while more than a million soldiers
died. On July 1, the British and French launched a counteroffensive on
the Somme River in Belgium. In their initial assault some 60,000
soldiers perished in a single day, a sum equivalent to all of the US
deaths during the 8-year Vietnam war.

While the blood-letting continued apace, Lenin sat down and wrote
"Imperialism the Final Stage of Capitalism." This work is not mainly
an economic dissertation. It is rather a foundation for the political line
defended by the Zimmerwald left. Lenin zeroed in on the bankruptcy
of social democratic reformism, the existence of an objectively
revolutionary situation in the warring nations, the relationship of the
World War to the crisis of imperialism, the link between struggles for
national self-determination and socialism, and, finally, the need for a
Third International. His work belongs next to the "Communist
Manifesto" on the bookshelves, not next to volumes by Anwar Sheikh
or Immanuel Wallerstein.

The Third International, or Communist International, has its roots in
the Zimmerwald conferences. The leftists, under Lenin's leadership,
had concluded that a new international was necessary. Left-wing
Socialists would have formed a new international whether or not there
had been a successful revolution in Russia. World War One, and the
attitude of socialists toward it, caused the major division in the
twentieth century's left-wing.

Sometimes splits are unnecessary, such as is the case 98 times out of a
100 in the Trotskyist and Maoist movements, but sometimes the left
has no other choice. This need existed when Lenin declared in his
1915 article "Socialism and War" that "We are firmly convinced that,
in the present state of affairs, a split with the opportunists and
chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries, just as a split with the
opportunists and chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries, just
as a split with the yellow trade unions, the anti-Semites, the liberal
workers' unions, etc., was essential in helping speed up the
enlightenment of backward workers and draw them into the ranks of
the Social-Democratic Party."

He added, "the Third International should be built up on this kind of
revolutionary basis. To our Party, the question of the expediency of a
break with the social-chauvinists does not exist, it has been answered
with finality. The only question that exists for our Party is whether this
can be achieved on an international scale in the immediate future."

Lenin's Bolshevik Party took power in Russia in 1917 and carried out
the program of the Zimmerwald left. It overthrew the capitalist ruling
class and made a separate peace with the Kaiser. The Soviet Union,
born out of the smoking, stinking and bleeding carcass of World War
One, set out on the road to socialism. The infant Soviet state fostered
the growth of the Third International, which captured the hopes of
Zimmerwald. Unfortunately, the revolution went into a steep decline
in the late 1920's and the Third International slowly became a mere
tool of Kremlin foreign policy.

THE SOVIET INVASION OF FINLAND
The Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of August 22, 1939 pact threw
the non-Stalinist left into a crisis. The CPUSA of course recognized
the wisdom of the pact immediately, just as rapidly as it repudiated it
the minute Hitler invaded the USSR. Many socialists outside the
Stalinist orbit, especially the social democrats, began to view the
USSR and Nazi Germany as mirror images of each other during this
period.

Some of these social democrats had become new members of the
Socialist Workers Party as a result of the "entryist" tactic of the James
P. Cannon-led Trotskyists. Trotsky had recommended that his co-
thinkers enter the newly radicalizing Socialist Parties and try to win
followers to his cause. The American Trotskyists made adroit use of
this tactic. In other countries, the Trotskyists entered a host body,
became part of the food chain and disappeared forever.

The consternation over the pact deepened. On September 17, 1939,
two and a half weeks after German troops invaded Poland, Soviet
forces invaded and occupied the eastern half of the country. Moscow
annexed occupied Poland in the following year. The same fate awaited
the Baltic nations of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

A significant grouping in the SWP, led by Max Shachtman and James
Burnham, came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was no longer
a worker's state. It instead represented a form of "bureaucratic
collectivism" that was no more progressive than Nazi Germany. The
genuine horror over the collaboration between Germany and the USSR
forced many of the people in this grouping to lose track of the all-
important class criterion. They reacted, as they should, with
conscience and good-will but forgot what makes Marxism unique: its
ability to see the underlying class character of all sorts of conflicts.
The shock and revulsion that many of these socialists felt is deeply
reminiscent of the dismay many leftists and socialists feel over the
civil war in former Yugoslavia. Such deeply felt humanitarianism
caused them to lose track of the class character of the imperialist
nations they appeal to for humane, military intervention.

Trotsky pointed to the anticapitalist implications of Soviet occupation,
which superseded all superficial parallels between the Hitler and Stalin
regimes:

"Let us for a moment conceive that in accordance with the treaty with
Hitler, the Moscow government leaves untouched the rights of private
property in the occupied areas and limits itself to 'control' after the
fascist pattern. Such a concession would have a deep-going principled
character and might become a starting point for a new chapter in the
history of the Soviet regime; and consequently a starting point for a
new appraisal on our part of the nature of the Soviet state.

"It is more likely, however, that in the territories scheduled to become
a part of the USSR, the Moscow government will carry through the
expropriation of the large landowners and statification of the means of
production. This variant is most probable not because the bureaucracy
remains true to the socialist program but because it is neither desirous
nor capable of sharing the power, and the privileges the latter entails,
with the old ruling classes in the occupied territories. Here an analogy
literally offers itself. The first Bonaparte halted the revolution by
means of a military dictatorship. However, when the French troops
invaded Poland, Napoleon signed a decree: 'Serfdom is abolished.'
This measure was dictated not by Napoleon's sympathies for the
peasants, nor by democratic principles, but rather by the fact that the
Bonapartist dictatorship bases itself not on private but on state
property. The invasion of Poland by the Red Army should, in the
nature of the case, result in the abolition of private capitalist property,
so as thus to bring the regime of the occupied territories into accord
with the regime of the USSR."

Such was the bracing, dispassionate and logical approach of Trotsky.
He sought to get beneath surface appearances and secondary moral
considerations in order to penetrate to the underlying class
relationships. These class relationships alone would provide the basis
for political action. Furthermore, the highest moral obligation in his
eyes was to make the socialist revolution. Socialism alone would create
the objective conditions for truly moral behavior.

EARL BROWDER AND THE NAZI INVASION OF THE USSR
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Communist Parties all around
the world threw themselves into support for all-out war against the
axis. They did not even take the stance of the centrist Zimmerwaldists
who at least pointed out the insanity of the war between rival
imperialisms. The CPUSA elevated the United States into the ranks of
the "progressive" capitalist forces, while casting Japan, Germany and
Italy into the role of "reactionary" war-mongers. The war-fever
overcame the American Communist Party completely. They backed
the jailing of antiwar SWP leaders for sedition. They supported a no-
strike pledge during WWII. They castigated efforts by the NAACP to
win full civil rights for Black people until the war ended.. In other
words, they took a position somewhat similar to the social democratic
"defensists" of W.W.I.

How did Earl Browder explain this rapid turnabout from the period of
the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact? What had happened to US
imperialism? Browder asserted that in May, 1942 the United States
ruling class was no longer imperialist. He dismissed Virgil Jordan's
speech in celebration of imperialism. He ignored the rather clear
existence of monopoly capitalism in the United States. This capitalist
class had recognized the changed character of the war, and was
preparing for a "Peoples' War of National Liberation," led by such
stalwarts as Generals George Patton and Curtis LeMay. Browder saw
Roosevelt in the light of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington,
rather than that of his uncle Teddy Roosevelt, defiler of Puerto Rico
and the Philippines.

What caused this "transformation" of imperialist war into people's
war? In Browder's view, the moment arrived in a May 8 speech by
vice-president Henry Wallace who stated among other things that
"This is a fight between a slave world and a free world. Just as the
United States could not remain half slave and half free in 1862, so in
1942 the world must make its decision for a complete victory one way
or the other." Browder nodded his head in fawning agreement while
Black Americans served in segregated companies in the army and
lacked the right to vote in the deep south.

Browder was the foremost Marxist leader in the United States at that
time. The Communist Party had tens of thousands of members,
including militant trade unionists and prominent intellectuals in its
ranks. It is depressing to think that this was the version of Marxism
they learned. No wonder so many people left the CP in demoralization
and disgust in the decades that followed. No wonder so many
radicalizing youths turned to Trotskyism or Maoism in the 1960's.

WORLD WAR TWO: PEOPLE'S WAR?
Washington's anti-fascism was the result of a recent "conversion".
American businesses sent oil to Italy in huge quantities after Mussolini
invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Mussolini used the oil to keep the war
against the African colony. When the fascists rose up in Spain in
1936, Roosevelt declared his neutrality while the fascist powers gave
complete aid to the Francoists. This ensured the victory of fascism in
Spain.

What brought the United States into the war was not a determination
to rid the world of fascism, but a response to the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor. It was only when Japan threatened US economic
interests in the Pacific that Washington entered the war. There is a
transcript of statement made to the War Cabinet by Henry Stimson in
November, 1941 that confirms this interpretation. Charles Beard cites
it in his "President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941."

"One problem troubled us very much. If you know that your enemy is
going to strike you, it is not usually wise to wait until he gets the jump
on you by taking the initiative. In spite of the risk involved, however,
in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to
have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make
sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so there should remain no
doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors. We discussed at
this meeting the basis on which this country's position could be most
clearly explained to our own people and to the world, in case we had to
go into the fight quickly because of some sudden move on the part of
the Japanese. We discussed the possibility of a statement summarizing
all the steps of aggression that the Japanese had already taken, the
encirclement of our interests in the Philippines which was resulting
and the threat to our vital supplies of rubber from Malay. I reminded
the president that on Aug. 19 [1941] he had warned the Japanese
Ambassador that if the steps which the Japanese were then taking
continued across the border into Thailand, he would regard it as a
matter affecting our safety, and suggested that he might point our that
the moves the Japanese were now apparently on the point of making
would be in fact a violation of a warning that had already been given."

 (Beard belonged to the earlier Progressive school of history and
politics. Other members were John Dewey the philosopher and cultural
historian Vernon Parrington. The Progressives predated the
intellectual milieu of both the CP and the New Deal--granted they are
somewhat identical--and were much less likely to believe WWII war
propaganda. These were people of Eugene V. Debs' generation and
likely to take the "people's war" rhetoric with a grain of salt.

Beard was a scholar of tremendous integrity, but his outspoken
opposition to World War Two caused him to become a rather isolated
figure in the world of cold-war liberalism. Younger liberal historians
considered him an odd duck and perhaps a little disturbed. Thomas
Kennedy, in his "Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy",
entertained critical speculations that Beard was surely deaf and
possibly senile when he went on the attack against WWII. He cites a
critic who views Beard's attacks on Roosevelt as "superstitions that
occupied Beard in his senility."

Of course, Beard was completely sane and clear-headed. It was the
muddle-headed New Deal liberals and their CP chums who had lost
control of their sanity. A new generation of "revisionist" historians
came along in the 1960's and put their support behind Beard's
interpretation.)

Did the United States intervention as an ally of the USSR against the
Nazis prove that it was fighting a "people's war" as opposed to a war
based on the need for power and profit? One can question the purity of
the motives in the war with Japan, but how can anybody gainsay the
crusade for democracy in Europe?

To begin with, Washington showed no intention of extending
democracy to the colonies of its European allies. Diplomat Sumner
Welles assured the French that they could hold on to their colonies. He
said, "This Government, mindful of its traditional friendship for
France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to
maintain their territories and preserve them intact."

Lurking beneath the surface of altruistic government propaganda of
the sort uttered by Henry Wallace was the occasional honest
assessment. Secretary of State Cordell Hull said "Leadership toward a
new system of international relationships in trade and other economic
affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our
great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the
responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of national self-
interest." The poet Archibald MacLeish, at that time an Assistant
Secretary of State, predicted the outcome of an allied victory. He
declared, "As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace
we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace
of shipping, a peace, in brief...without moral purpose or human
interest."

Did WWII rescue European Jewry to some extent? Supporters of
imperialist intervention in Bosnia tend to make analogies with this
presumed mission of WWII, but Roosevelt had no interest in saving
the lives of Jews. I need not go over this sad tale in detail. You should
read "While 6 Million Died", by NY Times reporter Arthur D. Morse,
which details the indifference at best, and anti-Semitic hatred at worst,
that existed in the US State Department. The President refused to take
decisive action against the Nazis and caused the deaths of many
thousands of Jews.

Despite the no-strike pledge of Communist Party, the class-struggle
continued at home with mounting fury. During the war, there were
14,000 strikes, involving 6,770,00 workers, more than in any period in
American history. A million miners, steelworkers, auto and
transportation workers went on strike in 1944. In Lowell,
Massachusetts, there were as many strikes in 1943 and 1944 as there
were in 1937. It was a "people's war" in the eyes of CPers and their
liberal allies. Despite this, textile workers there resented the fact that
the bosses' profits grew by 600% during the war while their wages
only went up by 36%.

(I gathered much of the information above from chapter 16, "A
People's War?", in Howard Zinn's indispensable "People's History of
the United State 1942-Present". A new edition of this classic has just
appeared and I urge people to make time for careful study of this work.
Howard Zinn was a bombardier on a B17 and flew in many missions
during WWII. His disgust with allied bombing of Dresden and
Hiroshima turned him into a pacifist.)

THE TROTSKYIST POSITION ON WWII
Zinn points out that there was very little opposition to WWII. The
Communist Party, of course, was gung-ho. The divided Socialist Party
could not provide a clear antiwar statement. According to Zinn, "Only
one organized socialist group opposed the war unequivocally. This was
the Socialist Workers Party."

What was the nature of the Trotskyist opposition? Were they agents of
Hitler and the Mikado as Stalin and his supporters in the CPUSA
asserted? As outrageous as this seems today, nearly every CPer
believed this lie during WWII.

First of all, there is no such thing as "Trotskyism." Trotsky was a
Marxist and his followers, to the best of their ability, tried to apply
Marxism to world politics. There is a lot of consistency between the
Trotskyist opposition to WWII and the stance of the Zimmerwald left.

The SWP position was not a simple pacifist opposition to all war. The
party supported the Soviet struggle against Hitler and wars of national
liberation such as the Chinese war against the Japanese. Lenin held
similar positions during W.W.I. In a collection of articles called
"Against the Stream," Lenin stressed that just wars of national
liberation by oppressed nationalities accompanied the imperialist war.

For the Trotskyists, WWII was a complex phenomenon that
incorporated 4 wars in one:

1. An interimperialist war between plunderers in which the United
States and England were just as reactionary as Germany and Japan.

2. A just war of self-defense by the Soviet Union against Hitlerism.

3. A just war of oppressed nationalities against their colonial overlords
whether allied or axis, including Japan, England and France.

4. A just war by working-people and peasants in Nazi-occupied
Europe. The Resistance in France was the best example of such a just
war.

The problem is that we can not separate these wars in a neat and clean
manner. They relate to each other in a complex and highly dialectical
manner. Furthermore, forces who had no interest in waging just wars
with full intensity and with full commitment to the class interests of
the oppressed workers and farmers unfortunately led them. The
problem for the Marxist left was how to support these just wars
without capitulating to the political forces leading them. This was at
the very heart of the difficulty in promoting a Marxist antiwar position
during WWII. Things would have been a whole lot easier if WWII was
simply a repeat of W.W.I but history is a stubborn and willful actor.

The problem for socialism is that the unjust war between imperialist
nations became juxtaposed against the just wars in the most
unfavorable circumstances. Stalin indeed did believe that England was
fighting a just war against Germany, and since the stakes in this war
were the highest, that it must take priority over other conflicts.
Therefore, logic dictated that the struggle for Indian independence be
subordinated to the greater war against the axis. It was no wonder that
Egyptian and Irish nationalists made tentative steps toward the axis
powers.

It was also difficult to sort out the just wars against Nazi occupation
from imperialist designs to exploit such struggles to their own
advantage. The OSS collaborated with the Resistance in France and
Yugoslavia. Milton Wolff, a high-ranking CPer and officer in the
Spanish Civil War, actually held a high office in the OSS during
WWII and recruited Lincoln Brigade veterans to work with the
resistance forces in Europe. Wolff, of course, was a socialist while his
associate William Donovan, the OSS chief, protected German war
criminals after WWII.

Marxist opposition to World War II was principled and correct, but it
did not stand much chance of gaining a wide following. This should
not present a problem for us. We seek the revolutionary kernel of
Marxism. All else is besides the point.

THE CLASS CHARACTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS
It is important to understand that just as the Zimmerwald left was the
Third International in embryonic form, so were the allied powers in
WWII in incipient form the future United Nations. The allies often
referred to themselves as the United Nations.. In Browder's 1942
"Victory and After," a defense of WWII as a "people's war," he
constantly refers to England, the United States and the USSR as the
"United Nations." For example, he says "The various pacts and
agreement, announced on June 11 [1942], complete the foundations
for policy required for victory of the United Nations. They confirm the
character of the war as a Peoples' War of National Liberation. They
consolidate the alliance of the three nations [England, US and USSR]
whose close cooperation is essential to victory, and to rousing, arming,
and leading the peoples of the world for that victory. They deliver a
smashing blow against Hitler's Fifth Column. They open the
perspective of a post-war world where it will be possible to reconstruct
the shattered nations and an international order among nations,
avoiding much of the unnecessary chaos and civil war that followed
the armistice of W.W.I. They arouse the enthusiasm and fighting spirit
of the people, that morale which the greatest military genius has
always recognized as having for victory three times the value of
armaments."

Woven into this bellicose chatter is a belief that has cropped up
continuously in our discussion of the civil war in former Yugoslavia.
Can this combination of England, the United States and former Soviet
Union, which is rapidly changing its class character, along with other
capitalist nations, help to prevent "unnecessary chaos and civil war"?

How grounded is this belief in reality?

England, United States and the Soviet Union formed the United
Nations within the context of diplomatic jockeying over how to divide
the spoils of WWII. These discussions took place at Yalta and
Potsdam, and influenced completely the decisions shaping the
character of the UN. Behind all of the human rights and democracy
rhetoric accompanying the creation of the UN, power politics lay
beneath the surface.

The United States sought to capitalize on its impending victory in the
Pacific. Sumner Welles, under heavy criticism, disavowed charges in
March 1943 that "the Pacific should be a lake under American
jurisdiction..." Great Britain, for its part, sought to maintain its
imperial power. Churchill wrote Eden at the time, "If the Americans
want to take Japanese islands which they have conquered, let them do
so with our blessing and any form of words that may be agreeable to
them. But 'Hands Off the British Empire' is our maxim." Stalin's goal
was more modest. All he desired was a series of buffer states between
Western Europe and the Soviet Union that would be under its sphere
of influence. Stalin, despite all of Browder's happy talk, was rightly
nervous about another attack from the capitalist West.

To get a flavor of United States thinking at the time of formation of
the UN, let's eavesdrop in on a telephone conversation between War
Department official John J. McCloy and the State Department's Henry
L. Stimson:

McCloy: ...the argument is that if you extend that to the regional
arrangement against non-enemy states, Russia will want to have the
same thing in Europe and Asia and you will build up these big
regional systems which may provoke even greater wars and you've cut
out the heart of the world organization.

Stimson: Yes.

McCloy: That the whole idea is to use collective action and by these
exceptions you would

Stimson: of course you'll, you'll cut into the size of the new
organization by what you agreed to now

McCloy: Yes, that's right. That was recognized...and maybe the same
nation that had done the underhanded stirring up might veto any
action any action by the regional arrangement to stop it--to put a stop
to the aggression. Now that's the thing that they [Russia] are afraid of,
but, and it's a real fear and they have a real asset and they are a real
military asset to us.

Stimson: Yes,

McCloy: but on the other hand we have a very strong interest in being
able to intervene promptly in Europe where the--twice now within a
generation we've been forced to send our sons over some

Stimson: Yes

McCloy: relatively minor Balkan incident, and we don't want to lose
the right to intervene promptly in Europe merely for the sake of
preserving our South American solidarity [this is not "solidarity" in
the sense of Committee in Solidarity with the Peoples of El Salvador]
because after all we, we will have England, England's navy and army,
if not France's on our side, whereas the South American people are not
particularly strong in their own right, and the armies start in Europe
and they don't start in South America. However, I've been taking the
position that we ought to have our cake and eat it too; that we ought to
be free to operate under this regional arrangement in South America,
at the same time intervene promptly in Europe; that we oughtn't to
give away either asset...

Stimson: I think so, decidedly, because in the Monroe Doctrine and in-
-and that runs into hemispherical solidarity

McCloy: Yes

Stimson: we've gotten something we've developed over the decades

McCloy: Yes

Secretary: and it's in, it's an asset in case, and I don't think it ought to
be taken away from us....

So when we approach the UN hat in hand and implore them to "stop
the killing" in former Yugoslavia, let's not forget that the words above
reflect the true origins and purpose of this organization. There is no
difference between Henry Stimson and John McCloy, on one hand,
and Warren Christopher and Bill Clinton, on the other. All of them
are representatives of the United States ruling class and when we
appeal to them we are implicitly appealing to the Board of Directors of
General Electric, Boeing, Chrysler, etc. In other words, we are
addressing same war criminals that brought us the Korean War, the
Vietnam War, nuclear brinkmanship, and a host of other
inhumanities.

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS?
We must drop all false hopes in imperialist humanitarian
interventions.

We must challenge the implicit big-power bias that lies behind these
hopes. We extend an invitation to powers like the United States and
Western European powers to intervene in order to save lives, whether
or not this is in violation of international law. What if the black people
of Los Angeles appealed to the Cuban Army to protect them from
human rights abuses or ethnic cleansing? What would the world think,
apart from the firebrands on this list, about such a possibility?

If we wanted to appeal to the imperialist nations to step in and save
lives, let our goals be more definite and more manageable. The United
States has the economic wherewithal to bring its infant mortality rate
up to a par with Sweden's (meanwhile the average life expectancy in
Harlem is the same as it is Bangladesh). By this measure, in 1970
alone there were some 34,000 avoidable infant deaths in our country.
In 1986, there were about 17,000. From 1945 to the present, more than
a million American infants died needlessly. They were not the victims
of "ethnic cleansing," gas chambers or aerial bombardment. They died
of malnutrition, diarrhea, fires and accidents in unsafe slum housing,
etc. Let's use "humanitarian intervention" at home to prevent these
sorts of deaths.

When Jewish organizations urged the allies to bomb Auschwitz, the
above-cited John McCloy replied that "such an operation could be
executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to
the success of our forces" and would be of "doubtful efficacy."
Moreover, said McCloy, "such an effort, even if practicable, might
provoke even more vindictive actions by the Germans." Let us remind
ourselves that when we are appealing to the United States government,
we are appealing to people like John McCloy, a life-long Democrat.

The only "humanitarian interventions" that make any sense are those
that we make when we commit ourselves to the socialist movement.
We need to build a world where the one flag is, as in the words of Paul
Lafargue, "the red flag of the international proletariat."

Bibliography:

Charles A. Beard, "President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War
1941"

Earl Browder, "Victory and After"

James P. Cannon, "The Socialist Workers Party in World War Two"

Thomas Kennedy, "Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy"

Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War"

V.I. Lenin, "On Proletarian Internationalism"

A. Craig Nelson, "War on War"

Stephen Shalom, "Imperial Alibis"

Leon Trotsky, "In Defense of Marxism"

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States"

(Exact citations are available on request)


     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------