Unite Against Wickedness. posted by Richard Seymour

So call me insensitive.

Robin at Perfect.co.uk has explained why he signed the statement by Unite Against Terror , a project that seems to have emanated from the bowels of Labour Friends of Iraq (I'd love to link to their gorgeous website, but some evil person has hacked it at the moment).

Not that anyone gives a flying fuck in a high wind, let me explain why I'm not putting my name to that pile of fucking shit. The first few reasons are only half-serious. 1) My co-signers would be largely, though not exclusively, a pile of hand-wringing warmongers whose signing of such a statement is hypocritical and an attempt at self-exculpation. 2) I hate joining the latest narcissistic "I'm a good guy, really" club. I'm not a good guy. I'll inject your new born baby with smack if someone pays me enough to do it: that's not a rash, that's track marks. 3) When Robin says "There is nothing in their statement any reasonable person can disagree with", my immediate reaction is "I bet I can think of a few things".

And so I can, and did.

Before I go any further, however, I want to make it clear that even if it was true that the statement contained nothing any reasonable person could disagree with, one still wouldn’t necessarily, automatically sign it. The statement has to be worth something politically, not merely a pedantic restatement of what everyone already knows. It has to have some effect: political speech is conative or it is nothing. Robin says:

As I’ve pointed out before, they have a tendency to paint their opponents as ‘fellow travellers’, and this case is no exception. So let’s not fall into their trap. Sign their statement, and let’s carry on the debate.

We are not under obligation to sign their statement. If they want to throw around lies and slanders about the Left, that is their business, and we shouldn’t be affected by a cowardly attempt to force us into pleading innocence. The fact that this is precisely what the statement appears to be is a perfectly excellent reason for not signing it.

I find a number of problems with the statement, as advertised above. Aside from the cringe-worthy lachrymosity and the cloying self-regard (‘hand holding hand’ – there just isn’t enough food in the world to produce enough vomit), there are a number of straightforwardly inaccurate statements. For instance:

The road to a just solution in Israel-Palestine is signposted by 'mutual recognition' and 'political dialogue' not the blind alley of terrorism.

I don’t accept that ‘mutual recognition’ would be a just settlement. Israel is a racist state. Its construction as ‘the Jewish State’ is the problem. It is what lay behind the ethnic cleansing and continual injustice toward the Palestinians: seizure of territory, reducing the Arab population, forming a Jewish majority. It is what lies behind the present entrenchment in the West Bank, even as a great deal of hullabaloo is made about the Gaza ‘withdrawal’. It is what lies behind Israel’s aggressive foreign policy (ie occupation, conquest, the seizure of territory and resources). It is the reason why settlements have been pushed and protected by the Israeli government and military – at the last count, these heavily militarised settlements covered 40% of the West Bank. At every attempt at ‘political dialogue’, Israel has demonstrated its contempt toward the notion of Palestinian statehood and in everything else it has done, it has shown that it doesn’t wish to co-exist with a free Palestine, even within the pre-1967 borders.

Then there’s this:

This terrorist violence is not a response by 'Muslims' to the injustices perpetrated upon them by 'the west'. Western democracies have been responsible for some of the ills of this world but not for the terrorist murders of these deluded Bin-Ladenists.

This is manifest bullshit. The terrorism of which they speak may not be only a response to injustices perpetrated on the Muslim world by the West, but it is partly that. Only the congenitally purblind, or the hand-washing warmongers, could fail to see it.

Frankly, this ridiculous campaign has absolutely nothing to do with uniting against ‘terror’. It is very selective about which terror it opposes. It opposes that carried out by a variety of groups inspired by a reactionary kind of Islamism. It doesn’t oppose that carried out by far right Colombian militias. It doesn’t show any solidarity with trade unionists and peasants being murdered by those terrorists. It doesn’t oppose the terrorism of states against civilian populations: the targeting of civilians by the Russian government in Chechnya; the massacre in Fallujah; the use of death squads in the ‘new Iraq’; the repeated assaults on Palestinians. About these, it is wordless – and culpably so. For a statement that supposedly unites against ‘terror’, it says only what is all too easy to say, and deliberately says nothing that could offend Mr Bush or Mr Blair. Read the statements by those who signed it – most of those who did so are obviously only interested in attacking the Left.

I’m afraid I haven’t gone far enough. The Palestinians are right to fight the Israelis, and I support their being armed with the tanks and helicopters that their opponents have. The Iraqi resistance is right to fight the occupiers, and I support attacks on UK & US troops. The resistance in Chechnya is right to fight the Russians, and I support attacks on the Russian army. I am a supporter – nay, glorifier – of terrorism. Potentially, under new legislation, I could be locked up or deported – if only my skin were brown and my face bearded.

That still isn’t far enough. Those who have signed this statement have largely been apologists for a new wave of imperial aggression. They have militantly and steadfastly avoided studying the intentions and ideology of the self-professed ‘liberators’, a gesture they would never reproduce if the agents had black skin and the President was a fundamentalist in some other style. They have even gone to some lengths to cover up the results of the crimes of imperialism, insisting that we blame anyone but those who launched the war. They are ‘apologists amongst us’. They are complicit in mass murder.

But wait, there’s more. Blair undertook an aggressive war, knowing that it potentially could have dire consequences for citizens here. Given that the war was unjust and given that we were not allowed a say in the decision, I consider him co-responsible for what happened. But those who apologised for the war, supported it in their clamorous, anathematizing fashion, they call us apologists? Eat my fucking mushroom cloud.

To put it briefly, those who have the nerve, having supported this venture in Iraq, to still come out with lies, slander, innuendo and accusations against those who opposed it deserve to have their charges thrown back in their face. Fuck their statements and fuck their whining and griping. I ain’t signing shit.