Re:[Marxism] East Timor replies.

[Ggregray@xxxxxxx]

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why,so can I,or so can any man;
              But will they come when you do call for them?

"We warn the Czar."
The opening of an editorial  in a small town Tasmanian newspaper
at the time of  the Russo-Japanese war

"It's only words and words are all I have..."
Bee Gees.

The discussion around the support for the intervention of imperialist troops
in East Timor in 1999 by the DSP and others has come to a point where no
matter what is said to show that such support has helped to foster illusions in
imperialism the left proponents of that imperialist intervention simply deny it
has happened.

A high/low point of this trend was Nick Fredman's most recent post in which
he first quoted Tom O'Lincoln:
"I refer you to your fellow DSPer Nick, who acknowledges that the 1999
intervention did have 'some' imperialist illusion generating effect."
then Nick comments:
"And the 2006 Marxmail prize for quoting something out of context goes to
....Tom O"Lincoln! :) "

Then Nick goes onto to write another longish paragraph in which, as far as I
can tell, seems to concede precisely that there was just such an imperialist
illusion generating effect. So does the 2006 Marxmail prize for inconsistency
go to....Nick Fredman? :)

(Note for a few reasons I haven't quoted the paragraph I refer to. First I
don't want to put myself in danger of being accused of quoting out of context.
It is a longish paragraph and it would be tedious for me to retype the whole
thing and I don't have a clue how you incorporate text from another post in this
list without that tedium.

 Now in other contexts Nick has been infuriated by my lack of computer
knowledge and even suggested that I shouldn't take part in net based discussions
unless I shaped up. Well I try to stumble forward in my humble way and have a go
as we say out here. Anyway Nick's post was fairly recent and anyone interested
in checking it can go back about a dozen or so posts and read it in full and
in total context.)

But there is a further and more basic point to this discussion which I think
has not really been commented on so far.The realiy of the imperialist
intervention in East Timor in 1999 that it is pretty much sheer nonsense that 
the role
of the DSP and other  far lefts who supported it had any discernible effect
on it.

In fact the Greens, the Democrats-then a more weighty political force- large
segments of the media, print and broadcast, and groups such as WW11 veterans
from the Timor campaign all were very active in setting the political scene in
which the intervention became all but inevitable.

The claim that the DSP played any sort of important role is just the sort of
oer-weening, this Shakespeare stuff is catching, hubris that is skewered in
the quotes that preface this post.It did not affect what happened to the East
Timorese but it did ,in effect, provide a left cover to Aussie imperialism.

But its only words as the great philosophers the Bee Gees said.

Bob Gould doesn't insist that there was no imperialist illusion generating
effect he writes:
"That may or not be so. Greg,Tom and others overstate that in my view, but
even if it were as powerful an issue as they say,we'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."

I think Bob is wrong in two ways here. He overstates what was happening in
East Timor prior to the intervention. In saying that I don't in anyway deny the
horror of what was done by militias. Nor that there was crucial involvement of
the Indonesian military in that. But there was nothing like the slaughter of
the PKI and others to which Bob compares it. Further it is likely,
particularly in the light of the recent happenings in East Timor, that there 
were forces
at work other than the Indonesians in the 1999 brutalities.

With the most recent intervention it appears that the decapitation of the
national movement and its replacement with Jose Ramos Horta who has become a
major defender of the US "humanitarian" intervention in Iraq which he sees as
liberating for the Iraqis just as  the imperialist intervention in East Timor 
was
liberating for the East Timorese,proceeds apace under the guidance of Aussie
arms.

The other point about the 1999 intervention is that it came after the worst
of the brutal attacks on the populace had been carried out.

I have followed up Bob's earlier posts when he set out the times when
Marxists "supported military actions by imperialist states, or formed tacit 
alliances
with them." Some of these points were quite interesting-particularly the
Murmansk incident which I did not previously know about. But these incidents, in
my opinion, neither measured up to be as Bob characterised them nor provided a
template for marxists to support the 1999 or current imperialist interventions
in East Timor.
Greg Adler






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