|
FOS Statement on Professor Davidson's Libyan Analysis Circulated by Gary Keenan Canadians for Peace and Socialism Box 168 Slocan BC V0G 2C0 Phone: 1 250 355 2669 Dear Comrades. What Professor Lawrence Davidson said on March 19th (See below) CPS said on our website on February 24th. When an American PROFESSOR Lawrence Davidson says it is circulated by Gary Keenan and when a Canadian worker says it he is accused of having a “warped ideology”. http://www.focusonsocialism.ca/random.asp?ID=620 http://www.focusonsocialism.ca/random.asp?ID=618 . The issue is not what is wrong with what Professor Davidson said it is what is wrong with what Gary Keenan and Rafeh Hulays and the Canadian Arab Justice Committee (ADALA) and those that agree with their analysis said at the outset of the events that have now evolved into a US-NATO-French-Canadian military attack on the government of Libya, a member state of the United Nations. The debate sparked by the ADALA statement has been duplicated in peace coalitions all across the country. The peace movement is split on the issue of the UN resolution and the impending US-NATO-French-Canada military attack on the government of Libya. One is called upon to take sides. One member of the Communist Party in Calgary has coined the slogan: “No to Qaddafi! No to Imperialism! That is classic trotskyist centrist neutrality and has nothing to do with Communist Internationalism. Gary Keenan called for Qaddafi to be hung in the main square in Tripoli. He may just get his wish and along with Qaddafi tens of thousands of Libyan patriots compelled to defend the sovereignty of their country from US-NATO-French-Canadian imperialist military aggression with or without Qaddafi. The US-NATO armada with a UN resolution to cover up their crimes will stand by as monarchists and extremists egged on by Saudi Arabia do the dirty work. What is missing in PROFESSOR Davidson’s statement, the ADALA statement and the slogan coined by a spokesperson for the Communist Party in Calgary is the same. It ignores and trivializes the issue of Libyan sovereignty. An imperialist invasion force has been mobilized to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state of the United Nations and has deployed its vast military power on the side of the Libyan monarchists and their US supporters who oppose the Qaddafi government. The defectors from Qaddafi have been given a warm welcome in Washington where they have set up a government in waiting. Most of them have been educated in the USA. They do this even as the people of Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen and Bahrain are being suppressed the latter murdered by Saudi troops, the same country that spearheaded the Arab League call for a no-fly-zone over Libya. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon attempts to lend legitimacy to Canadian CF 18’s being sent to attack the people by recalling what the Canadian government sanctioned in 1999 when CF 18’s bombed Belgrade. Thousands died. I believe it was retired General Lewis McKenzie or a former Canadian ambassador that let slip on CBC the other day that Canadian CF 18 sorties in that aggression accounted for 18 to 20% of all of the NATO destruction and casualties inflicted on Belgrade. The countryside surrounding Belgrade is still littered with depleted uranium. That crime was committed under the mantra of the duty to protect. Who was the author of that contrived imperialist doctrine? Lloyd Axworthy former Liberal Foreign Minister. I remember him well from our days in Winnipeg and he hasn’t changed. The imperialists have a duty to protect the oil profits of the big foreign investors and they are fulfilling that duty to the letter even if they have to kill tens of thousands of Libyans to fulfill that duty to global finance capital. Today’s foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon cites the endorsement of the Arab League as moral justification for Canadian participation in aggression against the sovereign state of Libya that has done no injury to Canada. Has anyone taken the trouble to look at the composition of the Arab League (AL)? http://www.arab.de/arabinfo/league.htm  It is a composite of monarchies, US client states and developing states most of which are weak and dominated by Saudi Arabia. The AL vote has not been revealed. One news report says it was unanimous and another that Syria opposed the resolution. While the Arab League resolution sanctioning war has been given unlimited coverage in the capitalist media, the attempts of the African Union uniting 53 African states offering to broker a cease fire have been ignored. The Communist Party of Canada statement below exposes that double standard. Egypt that is supposed to now be free is one of the states that has called for a no-fly-zone over Libya. What does that mean? It means the people of Egypt are not yet free in spite of Lawrence Cannon’s spurious statement to that effect. What it means is there is still a government in Egypt that promotes a Mubarak pro-US foreign policy without Mubarak. The people of Egypt and Tunisia still confront governments that have simply changed the actors, not the class content of their rule. These states are not yet free of US domination and control. A struggle is under way in those countries for the sovereign right of the people to decide their own affairs without US imperialist intervention. They have made a step but have a long struggle ahead. What the G7 states and their NATO gendarme are doing to Libya they are planning to do to Cuba and Venezuela using the same set piece UN sanctioned canard of the “duty to protect” when the opportune moment arrives. Here is what the International Actions Centre (IAC) had to say. That is the website of the organization founded by Ramsey Clark former US Attorney General of the USA regularly attacked by Zionists and Miami Cuban reactionaries.  http://www.iacenter.org/nafricamideast/libya011711    The IAC site also carries the statement of the Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations. Here is what he had to say. http://www.iacenter.org/nafricamideast/libya-cuban-statement . I would recommend that these are the statements we should be circulating and asking Gary Keenan why he isn’t. When has US imperialism ever been on the side of the people? When has US imperialism ever been on the side of genuine revolutionaries? When has  US imperialism and its Canadian state monopoly capitalist ally ever respected the sovereignty of any state they wished to destroy? The favorite parlance of the corporate controlled mass media and their media shills such as the CBC’s Anthony Germaine, and the Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York, imbedded with the so-called revolutionaries waving monarchist flags, is to speak of the G7 US-NATO-EU states as “the international community.” What is the international community? It is all those states that kneel and grovel before G7 imperialism. There are 203 countries at last count on this planet and the majority are struggling against G7 imperialist, IMF, WTO, World Bank, NATO, NORTHCOM and now AFRICOM aggression. When Finance Minister Flaherty brings down his budget on Tuesday it will be a made-at-the-IMF budget with the same austerity for workers and tax cuts for corporations as the IMF has imposed on many Arab and African states. The term international community is an imperialist contrivance and anyone calling themselves progressives should expose it for what it really is and strike it from their vocabulary.  The impending brutal NATO led assault on Libya is another front in the imperialist war underway in Iraq and Afghanistan and gradually being extended to Pakistan. The abstentions on the UN resolution are deplorable. Those states like China and Russia that claim to be concerned about world peace and could have cast a veto have not only raised doubts about those claims but are now complicit in whatever tragedies will befall the people of Libya resulting from the US-NATO-French-Canadian assaults now underway. The stance of the non-permanent members of the Security Council, Brazil, India and Germany that abstained, in spite of all of their tortured excuses are now also complicit in what is about to happen to the sovereignty of Libya and its people. The NATO assault on Libya has been undertaken to prevent the Qaddafi forces from winning the civil war. It has been undertaken in clear violation of international law and the Charter of the UN that does not sanction the overthrow by force the government of a member state of the UN. The Libyan government is not in violation of the UN Charter. Hillary Clinton’s stance is that a country may choose any form of government it wishes so long as it has the approval of US Imperialism. That is what the Libyan government rejects and it has every right to do so. It is that imperialist arrogance as expressed by Hillary Clinton that the Libyan foreign minister responded to when he said to western journalists and the US government and the UN, “Libya is our country – not yours.” Without NATO interference the Libyan government would have defeated the US backed monarchists and counter-revolutionaries and that is a certainty. Now the country may be split and a desultory war will ensue during which all of the social gains of the Libyan people derived from their nationalized oil resources will be lost. Libya enjoyed one of the higher standards of living on the African continent and the common people were its beneficiaries. Imperialism doesn’t like regimes that share anything with its people except exploitation and the national debt. Those Canadian voices, proclaiming themselves to be on the left, that wag their finger at Qaddafi for having made concessions to imperialism by permitting Suncor, Shell, SNC Lavalin and Bomardier to undertake joint ventures in Libya need to look to our own country, where foreign oil investor interests are pillaging Canadian energy resources with the complete approval of federal and provincial governments. The entire left with few exceptions has been once again knocked senseless by imperialist propaganda. As Bill Beeching was so fond of saying “once again we are being given the gold plated bamboozle.” There is a gradual return to a grasp by the Communist Party of the basic realities of the imperialist assault on the people of Libya. The March 8th statement of the Communist Party of Canada was weak and concessionary: http://www.communist-party.ca/pdf/CEC_Statement_on_Libya_March 8_2011.pdf  Since then the CPC has issued a stronger more forthright statement on March 19th which may be found at: http://www.communist-party.ca/pdf/Statement_on_Libya_2011_03_19.pdf for your information for study and circulation.  Let an American professor say belatedly what every clear headed Communist has been saying for weeks. The more voices against an imperialist attack on Libya the better. Those who were swept off their feet by the torrent of imperialist propaganda that preceded UN Resolution 1973 have some explaining to do. Which side are you on? Events are answering all of the questions of principle at stake for those who are not willfully blind. Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism  -----Original
Message----- |