Afterword by Andy Heintz
FOREWORD
by John Feffer
Polish revolutionaries lived by a powerful motto: for our freedom and yours. When Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kosciuszko fought in the American Revolution, he did so on behalf of universalist values: human dignity, equality and, of course, freedom. He was not doing Americans a favor. He saw the struggle of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as his struggle as well, the struggle of Poles to overthrow their colonial oppressor. He took up arms in the Continental Army as a form of solidarity, and he expected others to similarly fight in the Polish struggle.
This spirit of international solidarity has long animated the Left. It inspired American leftists to fight in the Abraham Lincoln brigade in the Spanish Civil War. It prompted the Left to support national liberation struggles in Vietnam, South Africa, and Nicaragua. It also motivated progressives to work hand in hand with movements for human rights, which sometimes produced some odd bedfellows, for instance in the Communist world or the Middle East.
But American leftists have had to reckon with the policy of the US government as well. It was one thing to support the anti-Marcos struggle in the Philippines or the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina in opposition to official US government policy. But what happened when the US government was also supporting Poland’s Solidarity movement? Or, later, when it proposed launching humanitarian interventions against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia to prevent genocide in Kosovo or Muammar Qadafi for the same stated purpose in Libya? The United States has had a terrible foreign-policy record of starting horrible wars, supporting authoritarian regimes, and instigating military coups. Can it ever act in the world for good reasons? Can progressives nowadays ever support a military intervention?
In this invaluable collection of interviews, Andy Heintz talks to critical intellectuals all over the world in an effort to illuminate this critical debate. It was a no-brainer for freedom lovers to side with Poland against the Russian empire or America against the British empire. It didn’t require a lot of reflection for leftists to take a stand against Franco or Marcos. Today, however, the geopolitical landscape has become considerably more difficult to navigate. The thinkers and activists who speak through this book are invaluable guides to this new intellectual terrain.
Intervention is not the only issue covered in this book. Activists around the globe are fighting neoliberal economics, corrupt politicians, sexism and homophobia, climate change, and much more. And they are not just oppositionists. They are also trying to articulate a positive agenda that can form a viable politics.
Here, too, this book illuminates many possible paths forward. This is, as Heintz points out, both a collective effort and an international one. We have to work together, and we have to link arms across borders – because so many of the problems we face today are global.
In this way, the discussions in this book can be a model for our future course. It provides an example of the best kind of globalization: globalization from below. Tadeusz Kosciuszko would have approved.
John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.
INTRODUCTION
I began to write this book when George Monbiot – a man whose writing I had long admired – was kind-hearted enough to grant me an interview, despite not knowing anything about me other than that I was just some random guy with a vague idea about writing a book about the Western Left. It was the beginning of an adventure that took me to places and exposed me to new ideas that I had never before considered.
The original plan was to write a book focused on the divisions that had split the Left in the Western world. When I use the term ‘Left’, I’m using the word in its broadest sense, to include human rights activists, women’s rights activists, feminists, liberals, progressives, anarcho-syndicalists, democratic socialists and adherents of libertarian and democratic socialism.
I had been following the fragmentation of the Left in the West – mostly in Britain and the United States – from my hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa. One issue being vigorously debated that piqued my interest was: is there such a thing as humanitarian intervention? This question was subsequently followed by the question: is military intervention by the United States or some other Western country in another country justified if that intervention could prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity?
The split over this issue, which has probably always existed but hadn’t been given a chance to surface, was finally revealed when prominent members of the Western Left quarreled over the legitimacy of military interventions by NATO and other coalitions of Western governments in Bosnia, Syria, Kosovo, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. While not completely agreeing with either group, it did seem clear that the US mainstream media would react to any invasion in the name of humanitarian intervention in a manner that was laced with selective amnesia, self-righteousness and double standards. However, the patriotic presuppositions and widespread acceptance of the narrative of American exceptionalism by the press didn’t seem like the only factor to consider when asking if military intervention was justified to stop the genocide and crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Serb-backed forces against Bosnian Muslims. After all, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that removed the Khmer Rouge from power and the Indian invasion of East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) to prevent the genocidal atrocities of the West Pakistani army did objectively prevent further genocide and crimes against humanity, even if the reasons for the invasions were not entirely altruistic. The Vietnamese regime was guilty of human rights abuses in its own country and the government they set up after Pol Pot’s abominable regime fell was far from perfect, but it was still a hundred times better than the Khmer Rouge. India, meanwhile, might have intervened because of empathy for the Bengalis being systematically slaughtered, and perhaps because of worries related to the economic burden that came with accepting millions of refugees fleeing East Pakistan. I’m not telling people when or if they should support Western military intervention in certain cases, but I’m suggesting that one’s stance on this issue should not solely be based on whether the West’s motives are purely altruisitic.
I hope this book will also make it clear that, just because someone is critical of US foreign policy in Iran, Syria, North Korea or Libya, it doesn’t mean they are apologists for Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Qadafi, Vladimir Putin or the Iranian regime. One can be against arming the Syrian rebels, while still ideologically siding with the Syrian revolutionaries. In addition, one can oppose harsh sanctions on Iran because of the belief these sanctions will hurt ordinary Iranians, while still voicing support for the pro-reform and pro-democracy movements within that country.