Ten years after 9/11: No to war and anti-muslim bigotry

Workers World Party statement: No to war frenzy!

The massive and stunning attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon pose tremendous challenges to the working class and the progressive movement in this country and around the world. The U.S. capitalist ruling class and its political establishment are now preparing a warlike response that can only lead to more suffering and deaths.

In times of crisis like this, the workers individually mobilize with great selflessness and sacrifice to save lives, aid the wounded and distressed, and try to return life to normal. People of many nationalities work shoulder-to-shoulder in an admirable spirit of cooperation and caring, in the same way they respond to natural disasters.

However, there is no politically independent, mass working-class movement in the United States at this moment that can make its own investigation and evaluation of what happened and why. Even the corporate press and media are being restricted more and more in where they can go and what they can say. The people are left totally dependent on the imperialist government for information, analysis and a course of action.

Under these conditions, it would be irresponsible at this time to jump to conclusions as to what political forces were behind these attacks. Many, many times in the past, going back to the battleship Maine in this country and the Reichstag fire in Germany, bogus explanations have been fabricated by the authorities in order to line up the population behind a course of aggression.

It should be remembered that the 1964 congressional resolution giving a blank check to the Johnson administration for the Vietnam War was passed 98-2 after a fabricated "attack" on U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf that was later exposed in the Pentagon Papers.

On Sept. 12, a resolution passed the U.S. Senate 100-0 that gives the present administration the same kind of unrestrained authority to wage war and to finance the Pentagon with whatever funds it requests. In the context of the present capitalist economic downturn, everyone should understand that this means with Social Security funds--the trillions of dollars set aside from workers' earnings for their retirement--more than anything else.

The pronouncements of U.S. leaders from President George W. Bush on down make it clear that the government's priority is to restore the image of unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the world by unleashing its powerful military somewhere. There can be no doubt that the targets will be peoples in oppressed countries where the mass sentiment is already one of anger at past U.S. aggression and extreme exploitation.

If this happens, it could unleash a witch-hunt against anti-war forces in this country and against immigrants whose national origins are similar to the peoples under attack.

The progressive movement must stand firm on its principles in these trying times. It must fight for the right to seek and tell the truth to the people and not be swept along in a torrent of chauvinism and war frenzy.

The representatives of the military-banking-industrial establishment have no answers. They can only make the situation worse as the system they defend spreads poverty and instability around the world.

The movement must seek to implement a program of class solidarity among workers of all nationalities, religions, genders and sexuality. It must continue to combat national oppression, racism and bigotry of all kinds.

It must counter the reactionary vision of Fortress America, with its inane but dangerous "missile shield" and rapid militarization of society, with the struggle for a truly humane, democratic, just and equitable world run by the working people.

This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

How U.S. destroyed progressive secular forces in Afghanistan

By Deirdre Griswold

The media are suddenly full of opinions about Afghanistan, now that the Bush administration is accusing Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists of being behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

In the 1980s, the reactionary political elements now ruling Afghanistan were working with the CIA to overthrow a progressive Afghani government supported by the Soviet Union. After the spending of an ocean of blood and billions of U.S. dollars, the reactionaries won.

Washington was happy and unconcerned as its protégés went on to butcher Afghani progressives, restore landlordism and repress women while fighting among themselves.

The eventual triumph of the Taleban faction represented a catastrophe for the Afghani people. Just in the last year thousands of Afghani refugees have died of starvation and exposure and Kabul, the capital, is such a wasteland that the U.S., demanding vengeance, can't even find anything to bomb.

On Oct. 10, 1996, Workers World printed the following article about how the U.S. strangled a popular revolution led by the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) against feudalism and imperialism.

Not that long ago, the bourgeoisie could still feel pride in their revolutionary history. They continued to celebrate the 1789 French Revolution and many other great victories in the struggle against feudal oppression.

They even spoke approvingly of the 1917 overthrow of the czarist autocracy in Russia. The problem, they said, was that the Bolsheviks had spoiled that struggle for democracy by going too far.

But capitalism in this rotten age of U.S. imperialist conquest of the globe has degenerated so far from its revolutionary roots that it is now, to borrow a phrase from Henry Kissinger, to the right of the czar. And it is celebrating the return of absolute feudal rule in Afghanistan.

The powerful media engines, their reach multiplied by the most modern technologies, are presenting the world with instant photographic images of a lynching--that's all it was--of the few progressives left in Kabul. .

To make the deed more palatable, the media use adjectives like "butcher" to describe former President Najibullah and his aides. Dragged out of the United Nations compound where they had sought asylum for the last four years, they were beaten to death and then left hanging for all to see.

But among themselves, foreign-policy experts for the U.S. establishment know that the Afghani progressives' real crime was that they tried to carry out a social transformation in their country in the direction of socialism.

What authority bears witness to this? None other than the U.S. Department of the Army itself.

The Pentagon puts out what it calls country study books on almost every country in the world. They are updated every few years. These books contain basic information for the use of U.S. personnel traveling or working abroad. There's nothing classified in them. They're available in most libraries.

"Afghanistan--a Country Study" for 1986 has of course the anti-communist line expected of a Pentagon publication. But it also contains much useful information about the changes instituted by the Afghani Revolution of 1978.

Freeing women and peasants

Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural landowners owned more than 45 percent of the arable land. A third of the rural people were landless laborers, sharecroppers or tenants.

Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular feature of rural life," says the U.S. Army report. An indebted farmer turned over half his crop each year to the money lender.

"When the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both landownership inequalities and usury," says the Pentagon report. Decree number six of the revolution canceled mortgage debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners.

The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs, especially for women. It printed textbooks in many languages--Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. "The government trained many more teachers, built additional schools and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans," says the country study.

Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3 percent in Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5 percent.

By 1985, despite a counter-revolutionary war financed by the CIA, there had been an 80-percent increase in hospital beds. The government initiated mobile medical units and brigades of women and young people to go to the undeveloped countryside and provide medical services to the peasants for the first time.

Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice in marriage. "Historically," said the U.S. manual, "gender roles and women's status have been tied to property relations. Women and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of property and to belong to a male."

Also: "A bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the wedding night could be murdered by her father and/or brothers."

The revolution was challenging all this.

Young women in the cities, where the new government's authority was strong, could tear off the veil, freely go out in public, attend school and get a job. They were organized in the Democratic Women's Organization of Afghanistan, founded in 1965 by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada.

Ratebzada's companion, Babrak Karmal, was one of the young revolutionaries who had formed the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in that same year and would later become president of the country.

Repression and revolution

A revolution was literally thrust upon this young party in 1978. The reactionary government of Mohammad Daoud, which was close to both the shah of Iran and the United States, arrested almost the entire leadership of the PDPA on April 26, 1978. There had been a huge funeral procession just a week earlier for a murdered member of the party, and the progressive masses in Kabul saw the new arrests as an attempt to annihilate the party just as the military junta had done to the workers' parties in Chile in 1973.

An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the popular party leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki--the soldiers actually broke down his prison walls with a tank. Within a day, Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government proclaimed, headed by Taraki.

This uprising of the soldiers and the city masses, many of them low-paid civil servants in a country with very little industry, was every bit as glorious as earlier revolutions against feudal tyranny in Europe. It held the promise of breaking down the old traditions based on oppression and fear.

The leaders of the PDPA were educated, although some, like Taraki, came from very poor families. But they had been to Kabul University, some had studied abroad, and they yearned to bring enlightenment and material progress to Afghanistan.

Had all this happened 150 years ago, the feudals would have been overthrown and Afghanistan welcomed into the fold of progressive bourgeois nations. But that was before the age of imperialism, and especially before the era of proletarian revolutions and the Cold War.

The U.S. CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting feudal warlords and their servants for a "holy war" against the communists, who had liberated "their" women and "their" peasants. Washington spent billions of dollars every year on the war.

The only country in the area ready to help the Afghani Revolution was the Soviet Union. The USSR intervened militarily. But it could not defeat this well-armed counter-revolutionary force.

Every battle was a test not only of Soviet military might but of the political resolve of its leaders. They finally withdrew the troops in 1989 as the shift to the right within the USSR became critical.

The war in Afghanistan began some 18 years ago. It continued long after the last progressive government in Kabul fell in 1992. The recent stage has been an orgy of destruction as rival reactionary groups fought for control of the capital, now mostly destroyed.

More than 2 million Afghanis have been killed in this struggle, and millions more made refugees. Now half the remaining population--the women--have been returned to the status of property without a single human right. A poor man unable to pay his debts can have his hand cut off for theft.

The schools and clinics built by the revolution are in ruins. The Taleban--a fundamentalist group supported by Pakistan that was trained and armed by the U.S. CIA--has taken the capital and is pursuing the war northward, toward the border with what were the Central Asian Soviet republics.

This is the hideous face of counter-revolution. Afghanistan has been dragged back more than 100 years. But it was the most modern weapons and communications systems, made in the USA, that killed the progressive dream of a generation of Afghani social revolutionaries.

This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

Human chain defends mosque

By Lou Paulsen
Chicago

Progressives in the Chicago area are discussing better ways to come to the defense of Arab, Muslim and other Asian peoples who face a continuing wave of racist attacks.

On two successive nights following the Sept. 11 disaster, hundreds of racist white youths, waving American flags, gathered in the southwest suburb of Oak Lawn and marched toward a mosque in nearby Bridgeview.

Police in riot gear held back the racists, but shut down access to the Arab community near the mosque, forcing people to show identification to enter and leave. In talking with media, the police referred to the mob as "showing their patriotism."

Other assaults on people and property have taken place all over the Chicago area. A south Asian gas station attendant was assaulted twice in one day, the second time by a man with a machete. A gasoline bomb was thrown into an Arab community center, fortunately doing no damage, and gunshots were fired into a shop in Gary. A cab driver was beaten by two men, and a mosque in Chicago was vandalized.

As of Saturday police had reported a dozen attacks serious enough to be called "hate crimes." There have been more since, and other assaults may not have been reported to the police. And verbal harassment is even more common.

Many Muslim women have been afraid to leave their homes in traditional dress, and it was estimated by a Sun-Times reporter that one third of the city's Muslim cabdrivers have been staying off the job.

A young man told a Workers World Party meeting, "My girlfriend's brother broke up one attack. A racist had dragged a guy out of a convenience store and was beating him up in the parking lot."

Workers oppose racist attacks

The vast majority of the working people are clearly opposed to this sort of racist attack. Religious leaders and community leaders have participated in vigils and interfaith services with Muslims, and government officials have so far denounced them and have promised arrests and prosecutions.

On Friday, over 100 people, organized by the Southwest Organizing Project and the Southwest Youth Collaborative, formed a human chain of solidarity around the Al-Salaam Mosque on 63rd street at Homan. This will take place every week during the Friday midday prayer service.

One paper reported that "Protestants and Catholics, whites, blacks and Hispanics carried signs with the Muslim greeting, Peace be upon you, Assalam Alaikum, and Christians, Jews and others support our Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters.

But progressives in Chicago realize that more has to be done. Workers have to make it clear that they won't just "call the police," but will personally come to the defense of the targets of racist attacks and assaults.

And, as an Arab American organizer pointed out, "Right now it's been private people doing these attacks. But pretty soon, it'll be the government. They'll attack individuals and organizations, or sweep through the neighborhood arresting people. That's when we'll need even more support."

This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011