Re: "Humanitarian Intervention in Congo" continues "Socialist command-type"

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2003-05-31 09:31 -0400, you wrote:
> Sorry, I was being lazy.
> In actual fact what CB actually said was this:

[there are reports that]

> "the UK would contribute forces to an intervention led by French forces (a
> bit of spin here?) into north east Congo. I suggest it is very hard to
> protest against such an intervention as being reactionary even though the
> pay off for imperialism is that it creates propaganda for the
> interventionist politics. As in west Africa it appears that the bodies of
> armed men, which every society needs, in north east Congo now consist of
> small groups with communal hatreds between them. In such a context which
> is extremely damaging for any sort of unity of working people,
> super-imperialism is more progressive than the political economy of
> war-lordism, since the weak bourgeois national state structures have
> failed to maintain a minimum social peace."

I agree what is happening is imperialism.

I also said, which you did not quote in your comment:

> A better outcome would be to aid Africa to have its own intervention
> force, as was tried to some extent in west Africa headed up by the
> anti-democratic Nigerian regime. But it looks as if neither Nigeria nor
> South Africa are up to sending troops to the Congo.
>
> I suspect the left in the imperialist heartlands will not see the
> opportunity to campaign against this particular humanitarian intervention
> in the way it did against the war in Iraq and let it pass by. There is
> some logic in that.
>
> But IMO it means that an anti-imperialist global strategy has to be more
> analytical than one of simple revolutionary defeatism at the beginning of
> the last century.

I appreciate your taking the point up Hari, because I thought it needed
discussion. I fear that without my raising it there might have been no
discussion. In practice people might have just acquiesced in it without
comment. I hear few voices on this lists calling on the imperialists to
keep their hands off Zimbabwe and instead compensate the country, although
I believe that is what citizens of the UK and the US should say.

Chris Burford
London