[Marxism] Re: East Timor

[Nick Fredman <srcsra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony Hartin:

> and it certainly hasn't turned out "good" - well done<.

Interesting that no-one can actually answer my claim that the East
Timorese nation in general and working people in particular are both
a lot better off now than in 1999, and better off than they would
have been had the intervention not happened.

> a  decades long political impasse was broken and we now have
> Australian  imperialism at work in the Solomons, Afghanistan and
> Iraq and wherever  the next mad military invasion is<.

<sarcasm> Right, right, so Australian imperialism was unemployed "for
decades" before 1999. There has been no Royal Australian Air Force
base in Malaysia continuously since the 50s, there were no machine
guns mounted on Australian helicopters shooting independence fighters
in Bougainville in the late 1980s, no Australian frigates in the
First Iraq War in 1990-91 (well as Jean Baudrillard taught us that
war didn't actually happen), there was no $8-10 million per year
spent on training the Indonesian military from the 80s until 1999,
and of course this didn't actually stop in 1999 because public
opinion made it unviable, there was no diplomatic, intelligence,
military and trade support for authoritarian and sometimes brutal
rule in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and/or China from the 50s
until the present, and of course none of these non-existent events
and processes have anything to do with protecting the investments of
Australian corporations in the region ... in fact Australian
imperialism was totally cowed until the silly social-imperialist DSP
and those duped trade unions and 100 000 protestors gave it a huge
leg-up in 1999, and would have had no chance of joining in the US War
in Terror. No other countries did, now did they? Well actually New
Zealand did, but withdrew in 2004, curious since New Zealand
imperialism was also reinvented in 1999 ... actually come to think of
it Spain and Portugal have also been forced by public opinion to
withdraw from Iraq as well, despite there being massive movements of
pro-imperialist delusion relating to East Timor in those countries in
1999 ... I'm beginning to think there's a few teeny weeny flaws in
your logic ... </sarcasm>

Actually your logic is totally flawed. Yes Australian imperialism,
like US imperialism, copped a defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese
revolutionaries in the early 1970s. It has been fighting to regain
its room for maneuver ever since. As I've asked on this list a number
of times before, to no response, if you've actually got some
*empirical evidence*, rather than *your opinion*, that the East Timor
solidarity movement in 1999 *helped* Australian imperialism in this
task, I'd like to see it. I've got plenty of evidence to the
contrary, not least the high correlation between the activists and
people in general who solidarised with East Timor, including the call
for UN military intervention, in 1999 (many of whom received an
education at the time about the history and social bases of
Australia's role in the region) and who subsequently opposed the
interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I'd suspect be at least be
very wary and critical of the Solomans intervention. I'd be very very
surprised if this strong correlation didn't also exist in New
Zealand, Spain, Portugal and everywhere else on the planet.
--
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