Re: Jose Perez and Iraq. Part 1

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Gould:
> Perez objects to my proposition that civilized Marxists should condemn the
> terror bombing of the civilians in the UN compound in Baghdad. I would have
> thought that this proposition was, from a traditional Marxist point of view,
> unexceptionable. It has been routine for most British Trotskyist
> organisations, for instance, to condemn Irish Republican bombings which
> have, even inadvertently, blown away civilians. Such statements of
> condemnation have frequently been made by the Militant Group, the old WRP,
> the British SWP, and other groups.


The Indian Revolt
New York Daily Tribune, September 4, 1857
by Karl Marx

The outrages committed by the revolted sepoys in India are indeed
appalling, hideous, ineffable--such as one is prepared to meet only in wars
of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in
one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by
the Vendeans on the "Blues," by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel
Frenchmen, by Serbians on their German and Hungarian neighbours, by Croats
on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac's Garde Mobile or Bonaparte's Decembrists
on the sons and daughters of proletarian France. However infamous the
conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of
England's own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation
of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled
rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an
organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human
history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that
its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.

full: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jessek/marxindia.html


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