July 5, 1984 Workers Vanguard
Dear Comrades:
Its a funny thing about bad political
positionssometimes they just wont go away. In this connection, we
found your article on the case of U.S. Marine Corporal Alfred Griffin
(Workers Vanguard No. 355, 25 May) of interest. The vindictive
punishment of this man by the imperialist military is an outrage. But so is
your attempt in the article to link your own cowardly call for saving the
survivors of the demolition of the Marine barracks in Beirut with his refusal
to go to Lebanon.. .to kill fellow Muslims.
Quite a few of the Marines who went to Lebanon to kill Muslims
didnt come back. That sometimes happens to those who sign up to fight the
dirty colonial wars of imperialism. We dont think its such a bad
thing eitherapparently you do. We dont care how many Marines walked
out of Beirut and how many were taken out in coffins. All we care about is that
they left. You wanted them all out alive. So we have a difference. While
you were cringing in anticipation of what the Reagan administration might do to
anyone who made unpatriotic noises in the wake of the decades biggest
military setback for U.S. imperialism, we observed that those who lived like
pigs frequently end up dying like pigs. Our slogan may have been too angular
for youbut it was not bloodthirsty. (It wasnt original
eitheras you are well aware.) It is simply an objective encapsulation of
the risks run by colonial gendarmes. Corporal Griffin may very well have saved
his own life by refusing to go to Lebanon and kill Muslims.
At your educational in Chicago on 5 May, SL Central Committee
member Seymour took your revisionism one step further and asserted that the
Marines were no better and no worse than any of the various
communal militias in Lebanon. Coming from the leading theoretician of the
tendency this repudiation of the Leninist position on imperialist intervention
in third world countries is shocking. Presumably Seymour thinks
that calling for saving the Marines makes more sense if the issue of
imperialism is downplayed. So he blithely announced that the militias of the
squabbling semi-colonial peoples of Lebanon are equivalent to the military SWAT
team of the worlds most dangerous imperialist power.
Whats next? Will WV begin to worry about the safety
of all the poor economic draftees in the British army of occupation in Northern
Ireland? Perhaps Seymour thinks that the British Army is no better and no
worse than the IRA and the UDA. Will we soon see a call for British
Troops Out of Ireland, Now, Alive! in WV? Somehow we doubt
itafter all, theyre not Americans.
It was remarkable that while joining the Democratic Party chorus
calling for getting the Marines out alive, WV never once advocated
saving the French paratroopers. Why not? They too had their ranks thinned by a
Shiite truck bomb. We suspect that their nationality was a factor.
Social-patriotism begins (and ends) at home.
Corporal Griffin is indeed a man of principle. We applaud his
refusal to live like a pig. But your cowardly flinch (based on the
calculation that it is more important to safeguard your good name
with your own ruling class than your claim to the revolutionary tradition of
Bolshevism) is a shameful blot on the record of the international Spartacist
tendency. It is reminiscent of Farrell Dobbs craven expression of remorse
over the assassination of imperialist chieftain J.F. Kennedy.
Bolshevik greetings, External Tendency of the iSt
SL Reply
The self-styled External Tendency (ET) has again displayed its
dismissive and contemptuous attitude toward black oppression. Not once in their
letter do they mention that Alfred Griffin is a black man in a
white-ruled racist societyas if this isnt important!and they
disappear the fact that he refused to fight in black Grenada. This Marine
corporals refusal to fight in Grenada and Lebanon personifies a
fundamental problem for American imperialism, namely, that a large fraction of
its combat forces consist of black men who are deeply alienated from the white
ruling class and less susceptible than whites to anti-communist and anti-Soviet
prejudices.
Imperialist armies consist of young workingmen sent off to die for
the interests of their rulers. Thus every capitalist armed force shows
potential contradictionit can be polarized along class lines between the
officer corps and the ranks. This potential is particularly explosive in the
dirty, unpopular, no-win colonial wars of decaying imperialism, and in the case
of the present U.S. military is exacerbated by the high proportion of black
soldiers.
As a Spartacist spokesman put it to the ETs at the Chicago
educational referred to in the present ET letter:
...one of the most objectively racist speeches
Ive heard by someone who claims to sympathize with us. Do you think that
the fact that a disproportionate number of combat troops of U.S. imperialism
are black and Hispanic doesnt matter? This is a social fact of
potentially enormous historic importance. Why do these blacks join the Marines?
Join the army? Because they want to kill in the service of Ronald Reagan? Is
that what you think? No! You have no sense of the desperation of black
people in this country. Youre contemptuous of them. Because the army is
the only place they can get three square meals a day, and they get a warm place
to sleep and learn a job skill. Thats why theyre in there.
Theyre the most alienated, theyre the people who are least
anti-Soviet. So what happens? Reagan sends them over to Lebanon and they get
killed. Every interview [in Lebanon] and the interviews in Camp Lejeune say,
this guy [Reagan] is getting us killed, we want out! Thats
the stuff of which mutinies are made. Of course, Nicaraguas different.
They go in, we want them to be defeated. Insofar as they have to take
casualties, we want the Marines to take casualties. But thats not
just our program. A revolutionary government in Nicaragua would also
appeal to these black soldiers, would try to fraternize with them, would
try to win over the prisoners of war. [It] would say, look, you are fighting
for an unjust cause. Thats the stuff that revolution in this country is
made of, and you have no sense of that whatsoever.
The Lebanon disaster is universally recognized as Reagans
biggest foreign policy defeat so far. Central to our position on the Lebanese
conflict encapsulated in the slogan, Marines Out of Lebanon, Now,
Alive! is that none of the myriad factions were fighting for a just
cause. All sides are squalid and no side is fighting imperialism. The ET
implicitly supported the Shiite/Druze/Syrian forces. They do this
dishonestly, through the false analogy with Northern Ireland, an analogy they
have used repeatedly. In Northern Ireland British troops are the state
power upholding the Protestant-supremacist (Orange) government which
oppresses the Irish Catholic minority. In making the analogy of Lebanon (before
the Marines were withdrawn last February) and Northern Ireland the ET is
implying that the Shiite/Druze/Syrian side was waging not only a war of
national liberation against U.S. imperialism but also a just struggle against a
reactionary government. This is a cynical effort to prettify the Lebanese
reality as do the Stalinists, SWP, Mandelites, Marcyites and revisionist left
in general.
The analogy between Lebanon and Northern Ireland is
wrongindeed, absurd at both levels. To begin with, the Marines
constituted a token military force, which, moreover, hid in their bunkers
during most of the fighting. As former Israeli chief of staff Mordechai Gur
explained a few months before Reagan ignominiously pulled the Marines out:
...the U.S. hope for establishing a strong central
government in Lebanon is unrealistic. No foreign military intervention can
accomplish thatcertainly not the U.S. Marines, whose force is so small
that nobody takes it seriously. Newsweek, 19 December
1983
Secondly, the Maronite-dominated Gemayel government
did not oppress the Lebanese Muslim population for the simple reason that it
did not govern them. Apart from the Israeli-occupied south, the effective
public force in the Muslim communities since last September has consisted of
fellow Muslims (Shiite Amal militia in West Beirut, Druze militia in the
Shuf Mountains, Syrian army in eastern and much of northern Lebanon). In recent
months much of the fighting in Lebanon has been among the various Muslim
communalist forces.
The present fighting in Lebanon is essentially a continuation of
the communalist bloodletting which broke out in the 1975-76 civil war. The
presence of a few thousand U.S. Marines guarding Beirut Airport did not change
the character of the conflict. The ET sometimes likes to posture that it is
upholding the old Spartacist positions against alleged revision by the SL
leadership. However, it is the ETs line on Lebanon which in substance
repudiates our position on the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war, which was then and
remains a touchstone of our opposition to the Stalinists, nationalists and New
Leftists who applaud the empty anti-imperialist posturing of
oppressive, pro-imperialist Third World factions and regimes.
When we raised the slogan Marines Out of Lebanon, Now,
Alive! it was coupled with the slogan, U.S. Out of Grenada, Dead or
Alive! This factwhich simply refutes the ETs contention that
we seek to make ourselves palatable to social-patriotsilluminates our
Marxist opposition to the vicarious bloodthirsty ET posture on the Marines:
live like pigs, die like pigs. Over Grenada, where unlike Lebanon
there was a just cause at stakethe defense of the rights of the
people of Grenada against the imperialist, racist U.S. invasionour
distaste for violence and loss of life is subordinated to our support for the
victory of the just cause, by whatever means are necessary, against the
violence of the oppressors. But even here, we unlike the ET do not claim to
enjoy the fact that sons of the working classblack and white, American
and French and what have youmust die for the crimes of their rulers.
Workers Vanguard No. 360, 3 August 1984 (emphasis in
original)
ET Rejoinder
September 21, 1984 Spartacist League
Comrades:
It is unfortunate that , a paper which once had a
reputation even among its political opponents for scrupulousness and integrity,
cannot address a polemic to the External Tendency without resorting to smears
and slanders.
Your response to our letter on the Griffin case (WV No.
360, 3 August) is a case in point. It begins with an ugly (yet ridiculous)
race-baiting smear that we demonstrated a dismissive and contemptuous
attitude toward black oppression by failing to reiterate the fact that
Griffin is black. The article continues by quoting Joseph Seymours attack
on us at the Chicago educational on 5 May for one of the most objectively
racist speeches Ive heard by someone who claims to sympathize with
us. Strong stuff! But why not clinch the argument by quoting the
offensive remarks themselves? We know whybecause to do so would expose
Seymour as a slanderer. What he found so racist was the elementary
observation that just as economic desperation induces some oppressed plebian
youth to volunteer for the military (what the reformists call the
economic draft) , it leads others to become cops and scabs.
It is clear from Seymours remarks that you have a rather
benign attitude toward the U.S. Marine Corps. Indeed you seem to view it as
some kind of government-sponsored social service which enables black and
minority youth to trade the misery of life in Americas ghettoes for a
regular paycheck, fresh air and three squares. Small wonder then
that you refer to the defeat inflicted on Reagans colonial gendarmes in
Beirut as a disaster and that your first reaction was to call for
saving the survivors.
Your pro-imperialist neutrality toward the American
intervention in Lebanon is clearly indicated by Seymour when he contrasts it to
a hypothetical future incursion in Nicaragua: Of course, Nicaraguas
different [than Lebanon]. They go in, we want them to be defeated. Insofar as
they have to take casualties, we want the Marines to take casualties. But
not in Beirutthere you didnt want them to be defeated, and you
explicitly didnt want them to take casualties. Why not? Because, as
Seymour explained in the same speech, the Marines were no better and no
worse than any of the indigenous semi-colonial militias. (We note that
you discreetly neglected to comment on this piece of anti-Leninist revisionism
in your reply, despite the fact that we had explicitly challenged you on it in
our letter.)
Lebanon and Northern Ireland
In earlier polemics we pointed to the parallel between Northern
Ireland and Lebanon, i.e., that in both cases there is (or was) an imperialist
military intervention into an inter-communal conflict. We suggested that the
Spartacist League/Britain would deeply discredit itself in the eyes of every
class-conscious worker were it to raise a call for British Troops Out of
Ireland, Now, Alive!. In your reply to us on Corporal Griffin you claim
that this is a false analogy for two reasons To begin with,
the Marines [in Lebanon] constituted a token military force, which,
moreover, hid in their bunkers during most of the fighting. Oh really?
Heres how you yourselves described the U.S. military intervention a few
short weeks before the demolition of the barracks:
...the U.S. is now committed to defending the Phalangist
gangsters with an additional 2,000 troops drawn from the American fleet in the
Indian Ocean, a total of 14,000 Marines both on shore and off and 12 warships
standing off the coast and 100 warplanes...
Behind the military escalation in Lebanon is U.S.
imperialisms global war drive against the Soviet Union...
The Pentagon has abandoned the pretense that U.S. forces
fire only when fired upon. A few days ago U.S. warships shelled positions deep
in Syrian-controlled territory in retaliation for anti-Phalange forces
bombarding the defense ministry in Beirut. U.S. forces are now routinely
providing artillery cover for the Lebanese army...
A year ago ... we wrote: The U.S. forces in Lebanon
are a beachhead for large-scale military intervention in the
regiondirectly posing the danger of a nuclear World War III.
(WV No. 338, 23 September 1983)
Further on in the same article you approvingly quoted Democratic
Congressman Clarence Long as noting that: Any 9-year-old kid watching
television can see our people in combat, but the President of the United States
doesnt see this as combat. Well apparently in hindsight, neither
does WV!
But quite apart from your current attempts to falsify the role and
activity of the American military intervention in Lebanon, there is an
important issue of principle involved herei.e., that Trotskyist
opposition to imperialist intervention in the semi-colonial world is
unconditional. We dont care who fired first, who was minding their
own business, or who was hiding in their bunkers. We dont care whether
the imperialist forces constitute the state power (as in Northern Ireland) or
merely act as auxiliaries to one side in the conflict (as in Lebanon). We want
all the imperialists out, immediately, by any means necessary.
The second distinction which you make between the two situations
is equally specious. You assert that unlike the Protestants in the six
counties, the Maronite-dominated Gemayel government did not
oppress the Lebanese Muslim population for the simple reason that it did not
govern them. But surely that was what all the fighting was aboutto
determine which of the warring communities would get to oppress the others. For
that reason revolutionists could take no side in the conflict between the
indigenous populations. But when any of these peoples is militarily
engaged with an imperialist powerwhether in Northern Ireland or
Lebanonwe do have a side. And that is why the analogy is
fundamentally sound.
You seem to have the peculiar notion that your call for the defeat
of the Marines in Grenada somehow cancels out your flinch over Lebanon. It
doesnt. All it proves is that it was easy to be tough over Grenada.
Reagan didnt care what you said about that onehe won.
The Beirut "disaster was a different story. It was the
biggest single military defeat inflicted on the U.S. since the Tet offensive.
It ultimately compelled the U.S. to pull out of Lebanon and was thus an
important setback to American plans to make Beirut a staging area for
anti-Soviet military moves in the Near East. Reagan didnt like that. So
just to be on the safe side, just to make it clear that you werent any
more pleased by this military reversal than the Democrats, you adopted
their program for the Marines in Lebanon. Reagans deployment is
stupid and senseless you saidlets get them
out now before more are killed. Tip ONeill was saying the same thing.
Eventually even Reagan came to see that this advice was in fact in the best
interests of American imperialism. So he carried out your demandhe got
the Marines Out of Lebanon, Alive! Congratulations.
You can continue to pretend that your flinch over the barracks
bombing was motivated by Bolshevik intransigence. You can probably even
convince some of your more impressionable new recruits that anything else would
have been bloodthirsty. (Although how will you explain the headline
on the front page of WV No. 207, 26 May 1978, on the slaughter of whites
in Zaire: Colonialists: Live Like PigsDie Like Pigs!?)
Serious political people who carefully examine the question will draw their own
conclusions.
Over the past year, under minimal pressure, the leadership of the
Spartacist League has consistently demonstrated a lack of backbone. The
cowardly flinch in defense of the Marines in Lebanon was prefigured by the
failure to uphold the unconditional defense of Soviet airspace during the furor
over the downing of KAL 007. Last July, at the time of the Democratic Party
convention in San Francisco, you once again showed your yellow stripe when you
refused to participate in a demonstration against the sinister Moral Majority.
Indeed, you even had the temerity to slander us for setting [you]
up by marching (under our own name) in that demonstration. Instead of
protesting Jerry Falwell, or, as we had proposed, attempting to initiate a
united-front demonstration against a planned KKK provocation, you flaunted your
peaceful, legal appetites with an obsequious (and ludicrous) offer
of defense guards to protect Fritz Mondale et. al. from a hallucinatory
threat of attack by Reagan, Dianne Feinstein and the fascists. In
WV No. 361 you take this new orientation to the Democrats one step
further when you repudiate the fundamental Marxist position that from the point
of view of the proletariat there is not a dimes worth of
difference between the twin parties of U.S. imperialism. We wonder
whats next.
Communist greetings, External Tendency of the iSt
P.S. We just noticed the box on the July 28th El Salvador
demonstration in Cleveland (WV No. 362, 14 September). Once you start
lying, it is so hard to stop. You suggest that the reason we marched with you
in Cleveland must be because we didnt see your signs
defending victims of racist military justice from Captain Dreyfus
to Corporal Griffin. This is willfully dishonest. Our letter on Corporal
Griffin, which you printed only two issues earlier, clearly stated our
position, i.e. that the vindictive punishment of this man by the
imperialist military is an outrage. We can only presume therefore that
this latest calumny is intended to make cynics of those who are under
discipline to defend it. |