[Marxism] Re: Australian troops back in East Timor

[Ozleft <Ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By Bob Gould

Tom O'Lincoln, Scott Hamilton and my good friend Greg Adler are 
battering away at the DSP for supporting the 1999 Australian 
intervention in East Timor.

I think the arguments that they are advancing are mistaken. I've written 
at length on this in a debate on Marxmail a couple of years ago, I don't 
take back a work of what I said, but it would be tedious to repeat all 
the arguments in the same detail.

The opponents of the first Australian intervention in East Timor 
implicitly presume that there is some kind of immutable, interminable 
Marxist principle that Marxists never in any circumstances have any kind 
of bloc with military actions by imperialist states.

This view is simply false. There are instances in which Marx, Engels, 
Lenin and Trotsky supported military actions by imperialist states, or 
formed tacit alliances with them. These instances are rare, but they do 
exists, as I spelled out in the previous discussion on Marxmail.

There's no serious in my mind that the Australian, and implied US, 
military intervention in Timor in 1999 is one of those necessary 
exceptional circumstances that required a tactic with the military 
forces of imperialist states.

The opponents of the 1999 intervention wax lyrical about how, 
politically, that intervention aided and abetted other, reactionary 
military interventions. That may or may not be so. Greg, Tom and others 
overstate that, in my view, but even if it were as powerful an issue as 
they say, you're dealing with matters of a quite different order of 
magnitude.

In 1999, the Indonesian military was involved in a wholesale massacre 
with the clear intention of decapitating the East Timorese national 
movement in the most brutal way – the same way the Indonesian military 
decapitated the Communist movement in 1966.

In the absence of a mass mobilisation of the working class in Indonesia 
and Australia, which was not happenning, the only material force capable 
of halting the massacre by the Indonesian state was military 
intervention by imperialist states.

Perceived political benefits to imperialism from the intervention are of 
massively lower significance than the extermination of the East Timorese 
mass movement and its leadership, which was proceeding at the time.

I find it faintly repellent for socialists to be groping around in the 
problems of development of a small independent state, attempting to 
prove a very abstract, and false, political point retrospectively.

How do the critics of the 1999 intervention in East Timor expect that 
country to have developed? Are they surprised at the contradictions and 
problems of development in a desperately poor former colony that is 
still under great pressure from imperialism?

Despite the current problems in East Timor, the present situation beats 
the hell out of the situation in say, Aceh or West Papua.

Despite the problems in East Timor and the presence of Australian, 
Portuguese and Malaysian troops, without prettifying the military forces 
of imperialist countries in any way, it has to be noted that the troops 
in East Timor are not behaving in the brutal, exterminatory way that the 
Indonesian military does in Aceh and West Papua. As everybody knows, I'm 
no particular friend of either faction of the DSP leadership, but I do 
respect the long-time involvement of the DSP, and non-Marxist activists 
such as Clinton Fernandez and others in the East Timor solidarity 
movement, and their opinions, based on considerable knowledge of East 
Timor, should be listened to carefully.

Metaphysical abstractions and invented principles have little 
application to the concrete problems of national movements, and in my 
view have very little to do with careful Marxist analysis.

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2003w09/msg00009.htm

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2003w10/msg00031.htm



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