Not normal bourgeois politics: Criminalizing political differences

Liberals witch hunt to impeach Trump driven by fear of the working class

 

BY SETH GALINSKY

The shrill and unrelenting witch hunt by liberal Democrats, some Republican politicians and most of the bourgeois news media who accuse President Donald Trump of “colluding” with Moscow to “influence” the 2016 presidential elections, has reached a new fever pitch. These forces thought they had finally reached a “gotcha” moment when Donald Trump Jr. admitted he had had a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin in June 2016.

The witch hunt is aimed at criminalizing what are in fact political differences in order to force the impeachment or indictment of President Trump and bring down his administration.

Trump is the target of an open-ended investigation by special counsel and former FBI chief Robert Mueller, as well as both the Senate and House intelligence committees.

The New York Times giddily ran an article July 22 that they had uncovered a memo by Kenneth Starr, who served as special counsel assigned to look into possible impeachment of then President Bill Clinton, that said a sitting president could be criminally indicted.

Liberal papers, nighttime TV talk shows, morning commentators and countless others with blood in their mouth are full of calls to bring Trump down.

This is not normal capitalist politics.

The capitalist rulers saw something new and different in the 2016 elections that kindled fear of the working class. The object of their fear isn’t Trump, but the workers they saw behind his victory. Millions of workers and farmers are beginning to see that the capitalist political parties have no solutions for the carnage they face from today’s deepening crisis of capitalism — except throwing the monetary and human costs of their crisis onto the backs of working people. The rulers fear what they see coming out of this — sharpening class struggle.

“The media often reports that Trump won a majority of voters without college degrees, which is taken by Trump supporters as just a nicer way of being called stupid,” Gary Abernathy, editor of the Times-Gazette in Hillsboro, Ohio — where Trump won 75 percent of the votes — wrote July 21. For millions of people, he says, when Trump calls charges of collusion with Moscow “fake news,” he “strikes a chord because the Russia hysteria is not real news, either, not compared with the issues that impact their daily lives.”

What is important here for class-conscious workers is not that Trump is better politically than the liberals, he isn’t. His goal, like theirs, is to defend the interests of the capitalist system in a time of crisis.

But the appointment of a special counsel, and fawning praise from the liberals for this former FBI top cop, is dangerous for the working class. The special counsel is called out when the rulers are looking to get someone. He starts with a target and then goes to work to find something to use. He digs with no time limit, no limits on what he can investigate or the charges he can bring. His appointment undercuts the constitutional protections to due process in the Bill of Rights.

And bringing down Trump would tell millions of workers who voted for him that their votes are less meaningful then the liberals’ political vendetta.

Trump fights back

Trump has begun to call out those he suspects of being part of the “leakers” feeding the press frenzy. And others he believes have made it easier for the liberals to use whatever they can get their hands on to take him down.

This is what’s behind his complaints that Attorney General Jeff Sessions betrayed him when he recused himself from having anything to do with the “Russian collusion” charges.

And Trump criticized Sessions for failing to investigate Hillary Clinton over the scandal that found she had illegally sent and received “top-secret” information on her personal computer.

In a remarkable turnabout, the liberal press has now become a champion of Sessions, a politician they have pilloried as a racist and reactionary. The July 27 Economist ran an article headlined, “Jeff Sessions Is in Peril; So Is America.”

Trump went back on the road to mobilize the workers who elected him against the liberals’ crusade. He spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 6,000 in Youngstown, Ohio, July 25.

When he said he was glad to be “back in the center of the American heartland, far away from the Washington swamp,” he got some of the biggest cheers of the night, with loud chants of “Drain the swamp.”

“I don’t care for the hatred directed towards him or the people who supported him,” Dave Torrance, an African-American Trump supporter who attended the rally from Hermitage, Pennsylvania, told the New York Post. “There have been plenty of presidents I did not vote for, but I always want them to be successful so that our country is successful.”

“He’s exactly who we wanted, someone fresh, different, not a politician,” Roxanne Jewell, of Orangeville, Ohio, told the Post.  
 

http://themilitant.com/2017/8129/812906.html

Ranchers’ Rights to Graze Cattle on Federal Lands

(As I See It)

Defend the Bundys! Defend ranchers’ access to 
public land

 

BY JOEL BRITTON

OAKLAND, Calif. — “In Defense of Ranchers’ Rights to Graze Cattle on Federal Lands” was the topic of the Militant Labor Forum here July 21. This writer was the speaker, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party.

On July 17 Dennis Richter, from Los Angeles, and I attended the opening day of the frame-up retrial in Las Vegas of Scott Drexler, Richard Lovelien, Eric Parker and Steven Stewart, four men who participated in a protest three years ago demanding that Cliven Bundy’s cattle be freed from federal government impoundment. A number of other people who joined the protest, including Bundy and two of his sons, are in prison pending later trials on related charges.

This past spring a jury in the same courtroom had been unable to find the defendants guilty. The charges included “assault on a federal officer,” “threatening a federal law enforcement officer,” “interstate travel in aid of extortion,” and “conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States.” Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial of the four, while two others were convicted on some of the charges.

The Bureau of Land Management seized 400 of Bundy’s cattle near his Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch in April 2014, and was preparing to take them to California and sell them. They claimed to be acting in defense of the environment, with court decisions backing them up.

The fact is the Bundys — like most farmers and ranchers — pride themselves on being stewards of the land, on which their livelihoods depend.

Hundreds of ranchers, family members and other supporters from all over the western United States rallied in defense of the right of the Bundys and all ranchers to graze their cattle on lands controlled by the federal government.

Federal agencies control nearly 87 percent of the land in Nevada. For generations Bundy family members paid grazing fees, until BLM bureaucrats arbitrarily limited Cliven Bundy to grazing 150 head on the land. He decided to ignore the order and continued to graze his cattle as his family had done for decades. By 2014, the family faced $1 million in unpaid fees, fines and interest, and a series of court orders to stop using federal lands near his small 160-acre ranch.

Following a tense standoff between the heavily armed Clark County police, sheriffs and BLM cops on one side, and Bundy family members and their supporters, a few of whom were armed, on the other, the cattle were released. As Lovelien’s attorney Shawn Perez said in his opening statement at the trial, “Not a shot was fired, not a bottle was thrown, not a rock was thrown.” Not by Lovelien, any of the other defendants or any other supporter of the Bundys.

After this victory, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, at that time the majority leader in the Senate, threatened, “It’s not over!” And sure enough, the FBI went to work to cook up “evidence” for frame-up charges against Bundy, the current defendants and others. The defendants have been denied bail while awaiting trial.

When the prosecutors failed to get the four defendants convicted last spring, they pressed for a new trial and got Judge Navarro to bar defense attorneys “from referencing constitutional rights to freely assemble and to bear arms,” and “from mentioning alleged misconduct or excessive force by law enforcement,” as they did successfully in the earlier trial.

Working people should stand with the Bundys and the other defendants. The day before the trial began, Richter and I knocked on doors in a workers’ neighborhood in Las Vegas near the Nellis Air Force Base.

“We introduced ourselves as members of the Socialist Workers Party, explained our revolutionary perspectives and reported on protests in defense of the Bundys and the other defendants party members had attended the day before,” said Richter. “The four workers who we had the chance to speak with at length said they had heard about the ranchers’ protests and the trials. They expressed their solidarity and all got copies of the Militant.”

We explained, and I repeated it at the forum in Oakland, that a fighting alliance between workers and independent producers such as ranchers and farmers is necessary to end the dictatorship of capital and to make the revolutionary changes needed in this country. “The logic of workers, farmers and ranchers fighting in our interests — against the wealthy capitalist rulers and their government — is to mobilize in our millions to take power, to establish a workers and farmers government,” I told the forum.

Such a government would ensure that ranchers are able to continue to make a living and act as guardians of the land and the environment as a whole.  
 

http://themilitant.com/2017/8129/812953.html

U.S. bourgeois campaign against the working class today

Liberals furor against Trump reflects fear of working class

BY SETH GALINSKY

Why are liberal Democrats, some Republican politicians and most of the mainstream capitalist media continuing to promote the witch hunt against President Donald Trump? Why can’t they accommodate themselves to work with his administration? After all, he’s one of their own: A wealthy capitalist seeking to advance the interests of U.S. capital at home and abroad.

The fact is both the Democratic and Republican parties are in crisis. The rulers increasingly fear the working class, which is battered by depression conditions and sees no wing of the capitalist political parties with answers and responds to Donald Trump’s call to “drain the swamp.” The bosses see working-class battles coming down the road.

The most significant phrase uttered by President Trump in his inaugural speech, economics columnist Martin Sandbu wrote in the July 18 Financial Times, was not “America First” but “American carnage.”

“What sort of country describes itself, in the words of its highest leader no less, in such terms?” Sandbu asked.

“American decline is not a figment of Mr. Trump’s imagination,” Sandbu said, describing the carnage facing working people in the U.S. “Centuries-old progress against mortality has gone in reverse” and working people “are dying from the afflictions of broken lives and broken communities: drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide.”

The rulers fear of the working class fuels the relentless drive of the liberal Democrats and media moguls, as well as the middle-class left and some anti-Trump Republicans, to press for indictments against his family members and to drive him from office. They are bound and determined to criminalize what are in fact political differences with President Trump.

Campaign against the working class 
“Trump didn’t seize the presidency by deception,” wrote Colbert King in the Washington Post July 14. “Nearly 63 million Americans sent that burlesque comedy with headliner Donald Trump to Washington.” In other words, the problem isn’t Trump, but the workers who voted for him.

“The hosts of the late-night shows decided that they had carte blanche to insult not just the people within this administration, but also the ordinary citizens who support Trump,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote in the May issue of Atlantic, viewing them as the “minions pouring out of his [Trump’s] clown car.”

As a result, working people don’t believe much of what they see on the news, Flanagan says, because they see themselves falsely portrayed as “a bunch of trailer-park, Oxy-snorting half-wits” and KKK supporters.

This is why the workers who turned to Trump, many of whom had turned to Barack Obama four years earlier, don’t buy the liberal assault on the president. They agree that the capitalist media runs “fake news.”

Is Moscow the smoking gun? 
After months of trying to find a crime they could pin on Trump and his administration, the New York Times and others leading the charge against the president thought they finally found the smoking gun — a June 9, 2016, meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer and an ex-spy lobbyist who they thought had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. says it turned out the duo didn’t have any information of use, and they listened instead to their calls for relaxing sanctions against Moscow.

But even after the release of Trump Jr.’s emails, and scores of op-eds in the Timesand other papers crying bloody murder, no one can point to any “crime” that has been committed.

President Trump gets a hearing from many workers when he argues that Hillary Clinton violated the law with her handling of thousands of government emails, but was never prosecuted, while “my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media.”

Charles Krauthammer, a conservative opponent of Trump, conceded in the Washington Post July 13 that Moscow is not the only world power that tries to intervene in the elections of other countries.

“You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power,” he said. “What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election?”

The criminalization of political differences between different factions of the capitalist parties will continue.

Both parties are wracked by divisions and will never be the same. In addition to the ceaseless anti-President Trump chorus, the Republicans are divided by their own differences, incapable time and again of passing an alternative to Obamacare. And this despite the fact they have a majority in both houses of Congress.

Trump himself isn’t really a Republican. “President Trump has a funny way of talking about the Republicans as if he’s not one of them,” James Hohmann wrote in the Post July 19. “Maybe it’s because he was a registered Democrat until as recently as 2009.”

The Democrats are in no better shape. While they all are buoyed by the shrill campaign against Trump, they are bitterly divided on how to rebuild a party that can win elections and con working people. The Bernie Sanders “revolution” is working hard to gain position to take over the party, even if it means the Democrats continue to lose elections while they plod along.  
 

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http://themilitant.com/2017/8128/812804.html

Joseph Hansen on 1969 moon landing

Read issue here:

Joseph Hansen:

The age-old fantasy of reaching the moon finally became a reality. The feat consti-
tutes a major milestone in the history of
mankind, particularly the development of
science.

Watching the coverage of the event on
television, who could fail to be impressed
by the technological level that has now
been reached?

First of all, that man's first steps on
another planet could be viewed by millions
of persons all around our own globe
at the very moment these steps were taken
would hardly have been credible only a
few years ago. This advance itself is one
of the fantastic consequences of the space
age with its Telestar relay system.

Equally remarkable was the display of
reliability, not to mention clarity in voice
and image, of the communications system
linking the astronauts with their Houston
base. How much depended on this can be
judged by what would have happened to
Armstrong and Aldrin after they landed
if a single link in this system had failed.
Even more impressive was the revela-
tion of the sophistication reached in the
computers that carried out the continual
calculations as to the orbits and rendez-
vous of the two space ships. Hardly born,
the computer is already automated, mini-
aturized, coupled with radar and brought
to a level of dependability that spoke for
itself in the Apollo 11 mission.

As to the power of the jet engines, this
met all the requirements long laid down
by the better science-fiction writers.
Perhaps the most outstanding feature
of the entire mission was its superb orga-
nizational level- at least this was what
struck many Americans, who incline to
be connoisseurs of the organizational side
of human endeavors, ranging from the
performance of teams in the field of sports
to work forces numbering in the tens and
hundreds of thousands.

Most of the labor in the Apollo 11 mission
went into planning and preparation, the
actual mission representing only a live
performance of drills already performed
thousands of times. The contrast to ex-
ploration in previous centuries was strik-
ing, a convenient gauge happening to be
available in the news about the failure of
Thor Heyerdahl's attempt to cross the
Atlantic in a papyrus-reed boat.

The truth is, of course, that an enter-
prise of the scope of this one -like the
successful production of the atomic bomb-
is beyond the capacity of private enter-
prise. Only a government could assemble
500,000 persons, allot $24 billion, make
available the resources of the Army, Navy,
and Air Force in a concentrated effort
of such breadth for almost a decade. Which
does not mean, of course, that it was not
a highly profitable business for the compa-
nies that got the contracts. An accounting
on this would be highly revealing....

Hansen concludes:

....What can be achieved through central-
ized organization and the application of
scientific knowledge has been shown in a
way that will sink deep into the conscious-
ness of the masses.

Why can't similar organization and
scientific knowledge be applied to make
our everyday lives more secure and liv-
able? If we can go to the moon, why can't
we assure food for everyone? Provide de-
cent housing? Adequate medical services?

Guaranteed yearly incomes? An end to war?

It is now all the harder for the powers
that be to dismiss such questions as uto-
pian. They proved that itwas even possible to go to the moon!

Before too long science may thus have
its revenge on those who have diverted
it to inhuman ends-to profit-making at
the expense of human needs, to mass
murder, to the construction of fiendish
weapons capable of exterminating man-
kind.

New layers of humanity will now see
in a more vivid way how insane capi-
talism has become and what a world
could be built if the technological base
humanity has constructed could be placed
at the disposal of the people and utilized
in accordance with rational planning.

The most important feature of the Apollo
11 triumph may yet be the impact it has
on bringing man, the tool-making animal,
to realize that he has become sufficiently
skilled with tools, and that now he must
master his social and economic relations
if he is not to perish from what the tool
has become.

Hysteria, violence, and deepening political crisis of the U.S. capitalist rulers

Shooter’s bullets driven by liberal fury, capitalist political crisis

BY TERRY EVANS

AND STEVE CLARK

July 10, 2017

James Hodgkinson, a campaign volunteer and fervent supporter of Democrat Bernie Sanders, set out with a semi-automatic rifle and handgun June 14 to kill as many Republican congressmen as he could. As he walked toward the field in suburban Washington, where they were practicing for an upcoming congressional baseball game, he asked whether the team was the Democrats or the Republicans. In his pocket he carried a list of GOP representatives.

Within a few minutes Hodgkinson had fired off some 50 rifle cartridges and 10 shots from his handgun, severely wounding Rep. Steve Scalise, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, and injuring four others. Members of a special Capitol Police security detail, assigned to Scalise due to his post as Republican house whip, shot and killed Hodgkinson before he could kill other Republican politicians. Senators Jeff Flake and Rand Paul and three other House members were also at the game.

The assault came amid a frenzy of anti-Donald Trump demagogy in the liberal media, Democratic Party circles, the middle-class left, and from Broadway to Hollywood and beyond. “It’s time to destroy Trump,” Hodgkinson himself had recently written on Facebook.

The shooting is a reflection of the deepening political crisis of the U.S. capitalist rulers that was revealed, and accelerated, by the outcome of the 2016 election. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are wracked with widening divisions. Neither of them, nor the two-party system through which the propertied U.S. families maintain their rule and defend their profits, will be the same again.

Behind the hysteria is the employing class’s fear of the workers who voted for Trump. They were hoping to “drain the swamp” of capitalist politics in Washington and somehow halt the mounting social, economic and human calamity they and millions of other working people face. The rulers and their political representatives in both ruling parties are frightened that the election results point to growing class struggle to come.

CBS news anchor Scott Pelley even rationalized the attempted assassination by blaming the Republican victims. “It’s time to ask,” he said, whether the attack “was to some degree, self-inflicted.” And Phil Montag, co-chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party technology committee, was caught on YouTube saying he was “glad” Scalise was shot — “I wish he was f---ing dead.”

Unabated witch hunt

The liberals’ witch hunt of President Donald Trump continues unabated. They hope the “investigation” by special prosecutor and ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller, initially justified to look into alleged “Russian ties” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, will damage the president and/or those around him enough to somehow invalidate the election results or even lead to impeachment proceedings.

Mueller’s 12 years as the federal government’s top cop equip him well to lead a witch hunt. Since the early 20th century, the FBI has served as Washington’s political police. It has spied on, harassed, and sought to disrupt political and union activity by vanguard workers, Socialist Workers Party members, fighters for Black liberation, and other opponents of Washington’s imperialist policies.

As special prosecutor, Mueller has the unqualified authority to force witnesses to testify and to drag them before a closed-door grand jury, where they have no right to counsel. Federal prosecutors — whether targeting working-class fighters, “organized crime” figures, union officials, or their own peers and rivals in the capitalist two-party setup — follow a notorious pattern. They pour agents and resources into finding something, anything, to pin on you, real or manufactured. “Where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” Then they go all out for a conviction or a plea bargain.

In the case of Donald Trump, the liberals and their newspapers and TV networks are more than pleased to boost the frame-up. Dispensing with any pretense of presumption of innocence, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote of Trump on the June 19 op-ed page, “in the court of public opinion he’s already guilty.”

Mueller has appointed a staff of lawyers that includes a number of Democratic Party donors, as well as a former Clinton Foundation attorney. Mueller is also a close friend of former FBI Director James Comey.

During the 2016 election, as part of an Obama administration effort to protect Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Comey usurped Justice Department authority by going on TV to say the FBI had decided not to recommend charges against her. Then, after he was fired by President Trump, he testified before Congress in early June that he “leaked” (through a friend) an FBI memo he’d written “because I thought that might prompt” the appointment of a special prosecutor.

“You don’t have to be a Trump partisan to have concerns about where all of this is headed,” said the Wall Street Journal in a June 16 editorial (and the Journal’s editors are decidedly not “Trump partisans.”) “Much of Washington clearly views Mr. Mueller as their agent to rid the country of a President they despise. Every political and social incentive in that city will press Mr. Mueller to oblige.”

Any attempt to impeach Trump, however, will infuriate millions of working people and others who voted for him, and many who didn’t, too. “American politics is divisive and dysfunctional as it is,” the Journal editorial warned. “Imagine what it will be like if millions of Americans conclude that a presidential election is being overturned by an elite consensus” of major newspapers and TV networks.

Growing numbers of working people already know something stinks about these “investigations” and the media orgy they’re subjected to morning, noon and night. This isn’t because they’re convinced the Trump administration has done anything to advance workers’ interests. Neither major capitalist party can or will. President Trump, like his Democratic and Republican predecessors, governs to advance the interests of the capitalist rulers and their profit-driven exploitation and oppression of working people.

Fewer workers than ever today identify themselves and the interests of their families with either party, the Democrats (the long self-proclaimed “friends of labor”) or the Republicans. They see that Democratic Party leaders and loyalists, as well as sections of the Republican Party, are determined to reverse the outcome of an election these bourgeois and middle-class layers can’t reconcile themselves to.

Liberal Democrats bemoan what they view as the “stupidity” and “ignorance” of workers and farmers who voted for Trump and who in mid-2017 are still incapable of “discovering” the danger of having him — instead of Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat — in the White House. Short of another sharp financial breakdown or deep capitalist recession, however, most of these working people will withhold judgment as long as they’re convinced the Democrats are determined to obstruct the new administration from doing anything.

Both capitalist parties fracture

The fracturing of the Democratic Party deepened after the defeat of party hopeful Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District June 20. Democrats had poured over $31 million into defeating the incumbent Republican. This was the fourth time this year that Democratic special election hopes have been dashed, trailing in the dust of others in Kansas, Montana and South Carolina.

These losses have aggravated political infighting between Democratic Party “regulars” — those who look to the Clintons, Barack Obama, or hopefuls such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — and those grouped around Bernie Sanders. Sanders and supporters of his “political revolution” increasingly insist that even if the Democratic Party loses some elections, those defeats are worth the price if they can wag their fingers and later take it over and reshape it as what they’ll falsely paint as a party of the “working class” and “progressives.”

As for the Republican Party, its divisions are shown, among other things, by its inability — despite sizable congressional majorities, especially in the House — to pass a single piece of substantive legislation since the opening of Congress and presidential inauguration in January. Their failure in both the House and the Senate to “repeal and replace” the erroneously named Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a clear example.

The depth of the GOP’s crisis, however, is revealed elsewhere. That’s the fact that they’re stuck with a president, the de facto head of the party, who wasn’t elected as a Republican. And who really isn’t one.  

http://themilitant.com/2017/8125/812503.html

Left Jew-hatred at gay rights march

Post from a comrade on Facebook.

3 women at a Chicago pride march were prevented from marching because their rainbow flags contained a Star of David. I'm angered but unfortunately unsurprised by these events.

I've felt for a long time in no uncertain terms that "anti-Zionism" as a political description today is a cover for Jew-hatred. The politics under that umbrella have become less and less coherent over the past decade, littered with poison pens and abstract conspiracies. By and large they only strengthen the worst dead end leaderships in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, from the worst butchers of the Israeli occupation to the the reactionary terrorists in Hamas.

I probably don't say this as loudly or as often as I should. As a firm opponent of the government in Tel Aviv, and a supporter of the fight for a viable Palestinian homeland, I would support any and every effort that I felt could advance that fight.

But Jew-hatred poses a danger much beyond the threat it poses to the small handful of Jews in the world. It's meant to disorient *fighters*. It's meant to disarm and redirect the anger of millions at the shape of their world and their place in it. It's meant to let the cynical ruling classes who sit atop a dying system off the hook for all the brutalities and indignities on earth, and toss them at the feet of the most maligned population in human history.

Though today I seem alone in these convictions, I share them with two of the greatest revolutionary leaders of the 20th century: Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela. Unlike most radical "anti-zionists", these men led successful revolutions, and subsequently guided their nations on the world stage. Both gave unconditional support to the fight for a Palestinian state, and both formally recognized the State of Israel as a historic reality, something not to be undone without tremendous cost to humanity. Both rejected Jew-hatred without equivocation and understood the stakes in that.

Don't believe me? I have evidence:

Nelson Mandela- https://youtu.be/HJcGTjAFGjk?t=3m58s
"We identify with the PLO because like us, they are fighting for the right of self-determination"
"The support... does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the Right of Israel to exist as a state legally"
"In our organization, we have Jews. In fact, Mr. Gadafi did not allow us to open our office in Libya"

Fidel Castro- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/castro-no-one-has-been-slandered-more-than-the-jews/62566/
"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews."

If I'm a "Zionist apologist" or any epithet you'd like to throw my way, I'm in good company. What company are you keeping? And what have they won for humanity?

Reactionary terror does not equal resistance

This is the crucial point, and I've never seen it more clearly formulated:

....In a May 29 interview on Legacy Radio, Clifford took up Corbyn’s claim that the growth of Islamic State and its terror attacks are a blow-back from London’s participation in the Washington-led Middle East and Afghanistan wars.

Reactionary terror isn’t an understandable response by the toilers to imperialist aggression. The Algerian people faced tremendous brutality at the hands of French colonialism, but they didn’t respond in a reactionary anti-working-class IS-style way, Clifford said. “They organized a powerful revolutionary struggle and established a workers and farmers government.”

And in Cuba, Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement led workers and farmers to overthrow the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. They have defended their socialist revolution for over 50 years, setting an example for workers everywhere.

Working people in the Middle East don’t need U.N.-imposed “stability,” as Corbyn has argued, Clifford said. They need time and space, free of foreign intervention, to find the way to fight for political power. “The Communist League calls for U.K., U.S. and all foreign troops out.” 

The Militant - June 19, 2017 -- Communist League campaign in UK fights attacks on workers’ rights

http://themilitant.com/2017/8124/812406.html