The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Arab journal Al Mustaqbal Al Arabi, published in Beirut. The European media treated this message with absolute silence. Such a response is clear proof of the solidarity of the imperialist partners. Democratic and progressive forces in Europe have the duty to dissociate themselves from this imperialist policy and support the proposals of the Iraqi resistance. Leaving the Iraqi people to confront its enemy alone is not an acceptable option. It reinforces the dangerous idea that there is nothing to expect from the West and its peoples and consequently encourages unacceptable—even criminal—excesses in the activities of certain resistance movements.

      The sooner the foreign occupation troops leave the country, and the stronger the support from democratic forces in Europe and throughout the world to the Iraqi people, the greater will be the possibilities for a better future for this martyred people. The longer the occupation lasts, the more dismal the future that follows its inevitable end.

      5. THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION

      The Palestinian people have, since the Balfour Declaration during the First World War, been the victim of a colonization project by a foreign people that has treated it like white settler colonialists in the United States treated “redskins.” This is true whether one cares to acknowledge it or pretends to be ignorant of it. This project has always been supported unconditionally by the dominant imperialist power in the region (yesterday Great Britain, today the United States), because the alien state established with that support can only ever be the ally, also unconditional, of the interventions required for the continual submission of the Arab Middle East to imperialist capitalism.

      This is completely obvious for all peoples of Africa and Asia. Consequently, the affirmation and defense of Palestinian rights spontaneously unite the peoples on these two continents. However, in Europe, the “Palestinian question” causes division, resulting from the confusions fostered by Zionist ideology, which is often met with favorable support.

      Today, more than ever, in conjunction with the deployment of the American “Greater Middle East” project, the rights of the Palestinian people have been abolished. Yet the PLO had accepted the Oslo and Madrid plans and the road map designed by Washington. It is Israel that has openly disowned its signature and continues to implement an even more ambitious expansion plan. The PLO has consequently been weakened: public opinion can rightly reproach it for having naively believed in the sincerity of its opponents. The support by the occupation authorities for its Islamist adversary (Hamas), initially, at least, and the spread of the Palestinian administration’s corrupt practices on which the “donors”—the World Bank, Europe, NGOs—are silent, if they are not participants, had to lead to the electoral victory of Hamas, an additional pretext immediately cited to justify unconditional alignment with Israel’s policies, “whatever they are”!

      The Zionist colonial project has always been a threat, beyond Palestine, for neighboring Arab peoples. Its ambitions to annex the Egyptian Sinai and its effective annexation of the Syrian Golan bear witness to this. A particular place is given to Israel in the project for a “Greater Middle East,” to its regional nuclear weapons monopoly and its role as a “required partner” (under the fallacious pretext that Israel has “technological competence” of which no Arab people is capable! Here we have the obligatory racism!).

      It is not my intention here to analyze the complex interactions between the resistance struggles against Zionist colonial expansion and the political conflicts and choices in Lebanon and Syria. The Baathist governments of Syria have, in their own way, resisted the demands of the imperialist powers and Israel. That this resistance has also served to legitimize more questionable ambitions (control of Lebanon) is certainly not debatable. Moreover, Syria has carefully chosen its allies from among the “least dangerous” in Lebanon. The Lebanese Communist Party had originally organized resistance to Israeli incursions into southern Lebanon (including water diversion). The Syrian, Lebanese, and Iranian governments cooperated closely to destroy this “dangerous base” and substitute Hezbollah for it. The assassination of Rafic Hariri obviously gave an opportunity for the imperialist powers (led by the United States, with France following behind) to intervene with a double objective: to force Damascus to align with the group of vassalized Arab states (Egypt, Saudi Arabia)—or, failing that, liquidate the vestiges of the degenerated Baathist government—and dismantle what remains of the ability to resist Israeli incursions by demanding Hezbollah’s “disarmament.” Rhetoric about “democracy” can usefully be called on in this context.

      THIS SUMMARY, QUITE UNREMARKABLE for the Arab reader, supplements what I wrote in the first volume of my memoirs concerning the positions taken in May 1948 and subsequently by the Arab states and the main political forces at that time (the nationalists, Islamists, and communists). It is up to the reader to take all this into account.

       These Memoirs

      I experienced the Bandung Conference as an Egyptian, first as a student in Paris and then as a functionary in Cairo.

      My analyses never led me to underestimate the responsibilities of the established governments, particularly that of Nasser. Quite the contrary, I attributed decisive responsibility for the failures to the inadequacies of these governments. Without false modesty, I will say that the book that I wrote in 1960, published under an assumed name, Hassan Riad, was prescient.¹⁴ I envisaged that the regime would pass away with a return to peripheral capitalism. The infitah gave concrete form to my prediction ten years later.

      My return to the Egyptian political scene through my participation in the Egyptian Social Forums beginning in 2002 led me to formulate critical positions with regard to the false alternative of political Islam or “democracy.” Needless to say, my positions are not always shared. Today, political conflicts in Egypt and in the region as a whole involve three sets of forces: those that claim to adhere to the nationalist past (but are in reality only the degraded and corrupt inheritors of the bureaucracies from the national-populist era); those that follow political Islam; and those that are attempting to form around “democratic” demands compatible with liberal economic management. None of these forces is acceptable to a left concerned about the interests of the working classes and the nation. In fact, the interests of the comprador classes associated with the imperialist system are expressed through these three tendencies. U.S. diplomacy works to keep these three irons in the fire, hoping to benefit from their conflicts. Attempting to become “involved” in these conflicts by allying with one or another of these forces (choosing the established governments to avoid the worst—political Islam—or seeking to ally with the latter to get rid of the governments) is destined to fail. The left must assert itself by becoming involved in struggles to defend: (i) the economic and social interests of the working classes, (ii) democracy, and (iii) the assertion of national sovereignty. What is more, all these struggles should be viewed as inseparable.

      The “Greater Middle East” region is now central in the conflict between the imperialist hegemon and the peoples of the entire world. To defeat the project of Washington’s establishment is the condition for the possibility of successful advances in any region of the world. Otherwise, all these advances will remain extremely vulnerable. This does not mean that the importance of struggles conducted in other areas of the world—Europe, Latin America, elsewhere—can be underestimated. It only means that they should be placed within a global perspective that contributes to Washington’s defeat in the region it has chosen for its criminal first strike.

      Consequently, the insistence that I place on continuing debates within the Arab left, in particular its Marxist wing, goes without saying.

      In Egypt, in the 1950s, I was in favor of Arab unity—like all my communist comrades—without being a “nationalist” (in the Arabic sense of qawmi), without accepting its stupidity (“Arabness flows through the blood of Arabs …”), without sharing the superficial but common opinion that the division of the Arab world into distinct states was mainly, if not exclusively, the result of “imperialist plots,” etc. Rather, we simply thought that liberation СКАЧАТЬ